


33(3) Days of Horror

by cryingdrama3



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Based On Buzzfeed Unsolved, Demons, F/F, F/M, Gay, Ghosts, M/M, Paranormal, Torture, prompts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-11-10 16:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 33,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20855060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryingdrama3/pseuds/cryingdrama3
Summary: Ah, shit. Here we go again.





	1. Day 1— Drowning

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger Warning: Waterboarding

In the Goldsworth household, the biggest things in life are considered normal. A mansion with fifteen room is considered a small home, a feast is dinner night, and a ball is considered a small get together. And this family party is the smallest ball in history. Its everyone in the family-- a problematic family as well. 

The smell of expensive food perfume the large house, filling the lungs of everyone in the most intoxicatingly beautiful way. That’s the only way anyone can describe Ricardo Goldsworth:  _ intoxicatingly beautiful.  _ He was a man that was similar to one of the old classic movies; full of class and grace, elegance he has was one identical to a queen. Every single soul that has had the pleasure of meeting him, was either charmed or intimidated. No one can touch him-- no one but his family. 

At first, you wouldn’t even think that he had a family, that he was a lonesome working man with many affairs: political, business and sexual. But he does have a family, a small tight knit family that no one can even imagine able to share the table with this man.

This man was not a man but an animal; a tiger was the closest thing that he can be. Beautiful in the wild but dangerous in captivity. Ricky was someone who was also a mirage in a senese. A fake. A liar. An actor. 

But what is he hiding? What does the tiger look like? Have you ever wondered where all that money comes from? Filthy and sticky with the gore and the blood that would make the most experienced doctor nauseous and sick to their stomach. All that he could say was that money is easier to wash than bloody clothes.

  
  
  


“So how’s work?” it was Francesca that asked. It always was her to ask that. They were after all the only breadwinners in their respective households. He and Francesca have a close yet estranged relationship-- close for the reasons that they were the only people of color in the area that won more money than the whole lower-class combined and estranged for the sole reason to look the other away about their business.  _ It wasn’t polite to snitch.  _

Ricky feels himself shrugs, uninterested in the conversation that he has everytime he does such events. “Busy. Messy. I think I need to change my rug though. It got stained.” 

“With?” it was impolite to ask but also to not. 

Ricky swallows a gulp of his champagne. He can feel the sunlight coming down over the horizon, as slow and sluggish as the day has felt. The beginning of Autumn has always felt like that to him. “Wine.” 

Francesca was smiling, she smiles the type you see on women who know too much and feel too little. The type where you don’t know if the feeling you have in your stomach is the pity of her not understanding how to feel or the understandment that she’s unfeeling. “Better stop drinking that much then,” she comments into the flute of champagne. “But tell me the truth, Ricky,” Francesca says. “How has work been  _ really _ going?”

Yes, Ricky was a powerful, not just politically or in the power of wealth but also in the mind. He knows the people around him and knows what they do and who they are and what their weak points are (money, the family name, international affairs-- he knows) but this woman, this woman who was wicked to her core and charming enough to make a manipulator’s head spin. And despite all of that-- Ricky Goldsworth found himself being completely  _ honest _ . 

“Bloody,” he confesses as he looks at the expensive leather dress shoes. “Sticky. Wet.”

“Wet?” she quizzes, eyes trying to not squint, feeling that some people were staring at them. It’s always been like that during these types of events. “Why was it wet?”

  
  
  


_ One of the stupidest things that Ricky has heard was someone saying that waterboarding is not a type of torture. Water is a surprising tactic to even cause pain, something used to create life, to make living thing live longer yet that same substance and having too much of it will end a life. He’s been swimming before and the feeling of water in his nose. But what he’s doing to this man was ten times worse.  _

_ Jacob Mitchell. He was one of the people in his staff who he never even looked twice at, he was his chauffeur driver and did some errands for him. And was a whistleblower for a fellow enemy that Ricky has known for a while that he has been under the lense of that enemy-- who looms in the shadows and has been sending threats to his family; a low blow indeed. Right in the gut. Ricky was lucky enough to have someone loyal, clever and even better actress than him that had whispered in his ear about him.  _

  
  
  


“I’m aware that you’re not used to that type of… extraction,” Francesca acknowledges. “But how did it feel?” 

Ricky’s eyes goes to across the large room and sees his family. A tall, thin man with a strangely charming nose and eyes that look constantly down and sad, and a little girl who was no longer oh-so little with dark hair and even darker eyes. A strange immediate family who were living under the same large room but that isn’t all of them. Ricky sees the bow bouncing in Sophia’s hair as she sways softly the music, and he smiles when he realizes that she’s turning fourteen the upcoming February of next year. Then he looks at Tinsley, the habit of calling him by his last name has never gone away despite sleeping next to each other in bed. “It feels… it feels worse than actually slitting their throat, you know?” the fake posh-ness he has underlying his voice was snapped like a tree branch under a pressure and weight. 

His eyes goes to his glass and he sees his distorted face in the reflection and he feels his chest tighten, making his stomach twist and turn as if he’s been sea sick. Ryan blinks and swallows the sour taste: “I wanted to see blood.” 

“Not seeing blood makes you sick?” she says coolly, raising the illusion they were talking about paperwork. “My, my, my. You truly are a little psycho—“

“No!” Ricky snaps at her, loud enough to cause the people in the room gave him a worried side eyed look.

  
  
  
  


_ The man chokes and gasps as the wet rag gets pulled away from his face, giving him the limited idea of oxygen coming into his lungs. Jacob coughs up and gags, “I’m sorry.” Ricky couldn’t make out if the liquid coming out of his eyes was water or tears. “I… I’m so sorry.” _

_ He doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t but he  _ _ has to.  _ _ The primal need in him, the human instinct to cause harm when harm is handed to you— the revenge that fuels those who have been wronged run in Ricky’s blood.  _

_ Blood. God, he craves it. He needs to see it to satisfy the anger in him. Whenever he sees it, his brain has accepted that his work has been done. His brain likes the peace of knowing that he has had revenge. Oh god, what would his family say? Tinsley has already accepted the wickedness in him but only as business, never for just want and enjoying it. Sophia knows, she’s not as dumb as she seems and has said that she loves him no matter what. In some disgusting, dark part in his brain has created this sick fantasy that Sophia will grow up to be just like him. It was enough to bring tears to his eyes.  _

_ “I’m so sorry,” Jacob’s hiccups brought him back to the feeling of the bucket and drenched towel in his hands. “Please… I’m… I’m a father. I… I have two little girls.”  _

_ That comment made his will snap and just drown him. Ricky lays the towel on Jacob’s face and leans down near his face, just by his ear to whisper: “Who… do… you work for?” If this man he could see what he looks like, he’ll see a monster. A creature who cannot help but destroy all what he walks by. The Mr. Hyde in his Jekyll.  _

  
  


Ricky’s blood turned cold in a simple second, the instinct to not fall under pressure of all of those hard, judgemental eyes. The posh accent that he has adapted to talk to all these people-- his audience. “No… No time for a toast like right now!” Ricky stuttered out with a wide smile, eyes wrinkling and tried so hard to have his eyes smile with the mask he wore. His hand goes to Tinsley and Sophia, who understood what he wanted.  _ What they thought he wanted.  _ They both hurry by his side, he feels the taller man’s arm wrapping around his waist as Sophia stands where their hips meet. A perfect family portrait. 

  
  
  


_ When his… work is dying, Ricky prefers to call them by their last name. Keeping the professionalism he has. But somehow he can’t call this dying man Mitchell. “I’m going to repeat myself one… last time. Okay? Okay.” he grits his teeth at Jacob. “Who do you work for?” _

_ And maybe it was the soaked towel over his face but Ricky’s temper snapped when he couldn’t understand. He dunks the last of the water onto the man, seeing it slowly drown him enough into unconsciousness. Ricky squeezes the man’s neck just to have the last thrill of taking a life with his own hands. With no blood. _

  
  
  


“A toast,” declares the rich man with a wide sparkling smile, at his audience and the family he knows that he has to lie to and to his only true friend. “A toast to the future. And the truth.”

His audience echoes him with their own drinks and they drink right after Ricky take his own sip. Treating him like royalty, not allowed to sit before him or have their heads over his own. All but his family and friend, treating him like an equal. Thinking that they are treating like an equal with the man in the mask. It makes you wonder who in reality is the one who is drowning. 

  
  


_ _


	2. Day 2– Jewelry Box

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That’s what they say.

Everyone was busy in the household, maids were making beds and cleaning up rooms and bathrooms, dusting every crook and cranny in the large, fifteen roomed house while the chefs cooked up the best they could create for the incoming guests. It was rare to actually have guest in the Goldsworth Household. Yes, they do host marvelous and simply magical ball and parties and events every other month but  _ no one really stays.  _

There have been many rumors that the reason why no one really stays, one of them is that it’s supposed to be haunted. Maids claim that when they walk past the arm gallery, one of the family portraits (the one with Mr. Goldsworth, accompanied with many people claim to be his mother) and that the older woman’s eyes follow them when they walk past. Or that when it’s late in the night, a man hangs from the large oak tree out in the garden, it’s silhouette shining under the sharp and hard moonlight. 

_ That is what they say.  _

Despite the rumors, they were still busy no matter what. The guest was actually very important to the family. A cousin of Mr. Goldsworth has been traveling with a cousin of Mister Tinsley, their work involves them always staying in a ratty motel with hard mattresses and yellowed sheet. But they’re back in town before going down in Southern California and then finally going back to their respective homes. Well, home. They share a small apartment, enough for three people. 

And the third person was Miss Sophia’s cousin. A young girl around the same age and with striking similarities in their looks to fool the daydreamer. Yet no one knows her name. Just her nickname. A maid once asked her name to be polite; as in the typical “Miss…?” Yet the girl didn’t answer and shook her head. Another strange occasion was when a maid who once worked there asked her if she needed help carrying something the girl shook her head and said: “You shouldn’t be carrying things. You’re expecting.” It turns out that yes— that maid was indeed pregnant. (It was a boy if you were wondering.)

A strange girl. 

  
  
  


Maids peaked down to the driveway when they heard a car’s tires crunch the gravel. Curious to see what their boss might do to greet them. All of them have watched his exchange between him and his brother which leads to squeezing their hands together as a promise to fight each other someday; or when he greets Mister Banjo, who he shakes his hand as if he has the Black Plague on his fingers; and finally when he sees Miss Francesca Norris, who he hugs like an intimate friend. 

But this is different. Everything for anyone that Ricky does is different. 

  
  
  


The first thing Ricky thought when he saw the car pulled up in the driveway he thought that he should hand some cash to his poor little cousin Ryan. He smiles nonetheless, never admitting it to him or anyone in the family that he’s the favorite cousin. Ryan climbs out of the passenger side of the car, seeming to have won a match of paper-rock-scissors. 

Tinsley was by his side as he watched his own cousin climb out of the driver side. He’s the one that lost obviously. He and Shane were close. Closer than he was with Banjo or Logan. Maybe it was their ability to soften themselves up with someone so hard. 

“How was your trip?” Ricky asks as he walks down the steps to greet his cousin with a hug and a friendly slap on the back. They pull away to see the tired face that his cousin had with the job he has. At least he loves his job. 

Ryan smiles but seems to miss his bed, bedhead proposed the idea of not able to sleep comfortably. “Hot. Arizona was a bitch.”

Tinsley and Shane were not the same but similar. Close enough to confuse as the same person but have their own traits. Either if it’s Tinsley’s shyness and able to push around easily or Shane’s quick mouth and subtle flirting. “Jesus Christ you look like a changed man,” Shane teases. “Is that silk I feel?” He then rubs the outer of his cousin’s shirt. 

Tinsley chuckles, eyes sleepy with the satisfaction of not needing to work another day of his life yet enjoying doing something. “No. It’s too nice to wear it in his heat.”

“Whew— you better head to Arizona then. It’s like the devil decided to throw up there.” Shane smiles wide, eyes wrinkling with the strangeness of an old soul in a young man. He was then pulled to see Sophia behind Tinsley, waiting to greet him. “You’re getting big, kiddo,” he comments as he lets her hug his torso and he pets her head. “You better not outgrow me though. I’ll be too old by then and it won’t count.”

Sophia didn’t say anything, eyes going to the car and she leaves, greeting his Uncle Ryan and she got the same comment about her height. She peeks into the car window and sees junk and boxes and clothes all over the car alongside wrappers of food and candy. But not her cousin. 

She jumps when she feels being lifted off the ground to be spun around. “Sup, weirdo!” Scout says and Sophia giggles as she kicked a bit to be put down. Finally she faces her to hug and and god has it been long. 

“Are you staying?” It was the first thing she asked, wanting a bit longer time to be with her. It gets lonely being the only young person in the house. 

Scout shakes her head, seeming to walk to stay with her too. “No. We’re going down south and then back home. But we’re staying the weekend with you though!” She points out the positive. 

Sophia smiles, slightly disappointed but glad to have at least three days with her. “I see. You want to go inside? How was your trip?”

“Girl— my skin is peeling off on my shoulders because of the damn sun!” 

  
  
  


Nighttime fell with the aid of drinks and food and jokes. Ryan and Ricky gossiped more than the girls and the maids combined while Tinsley and Shane talked about everything and nothing about collecting weird things such as butterflies in cases. Weirdos. 

But with Scout and Sophia in the bedroom it involved snacks and talking about the weird travels that she goes through. “You know what I hated?” Scout says as she throws the teddy bear up into the air to catch it while being on her back. “Every time we stopped for the bathroom, I didn’t want to go but then  _ moment _ we were back on the road I wanted to go.” 

With a snap of the apple slice in her mouth, Sophia nods. That’s all she can do. She can’t add any comments as her own personal bathroom was by her bed, behind a nice white door. “How hot was it?” Sophia asks. She wanted to know everything about it. Everything about everything and everywhere. Living in the same

House your whole life makes you want that. 

“All I can say that your house is Antarctica compared to Arizona. It’s full of old white people and fake blondes,” Scout says as she hugs the teddy bear. “But it was nice. I liked it. I did like weirdly shaped cacti if you know what I mean,” she snorts. 

The other girl blinks, not knowing what that meant. “What? How so? Were they shaped like people?” 

All that Scout could do is shake her head and sigh. Maybe going outside is good for you. 

  
  
  


The strange thing about the Goldsworth house was that there was an hour that feels doubled. It could be any hour. Noon will feel twice as long, or maybe 2 p.m or even diner would feel like a feast despite the small amount of food on the plates. It just feels… surreal. But that hour was happening right now at 3 a.m— well that’s according to the grandfather clock in the hallway. It clicked then chimed. The spaces in between them longer. 

Sophia was having a pleasant sleep when she was shaken awake and she turned to look at the person responsible to see Scout, wearing basketball shorts and a tank top as her own pajamas while Sophia’s night gown was under the sheets. The pink girl rubs her eyes awake, “Cousin? What are you doing up so late?” 

Scout hushes her. “Shhh. I snuck out of my room to give you this.” Then the feeling of something heavy appeared in her hands. 

Through the darkness she could finally see the outline of what appeared to be a box. Golden vines curving above red velvet casing, a glimmering red stone connected the top to the bottom. It was a strange yet beautiful jewelry box. “We bought it. Well… I did. I thought it would look nice on your vanity,” Scout says.

Sophia looks up at her and smiles, tired and not used to being awake up late. “Thank you.”

“There’s some jewelry still in their. I didn’t know if you wanted them or not. But you can throw them out if you don’t like them.”

The pink girl nods and places it on the nightstand with a small bang because of the weight of the box. “Thank you. It’s too early for this.” Sophia was going to continue when she sees Scout staring out the window of her room that faces the garden. Sophia leans to see what she was staring at and sees the full moon illuminating the oak tree as the wind blows. 

And if you were outside you could hear the creaking of rope on the branch.  _ That’s what they say.  _


	3. Day 3- Necklace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink will turn red over the years

Once the morning officially came and the grandfather clock in the hallway rang with a loud shrill sound to wake the people used to that sharp sound. When Tinsley had first started living here he had jumped out of bed like in the old cartoons while Ricky simply sighs before sitting up. Tinsley had wondered if the man even sleeps at all, that all he does is stare at the back of his eyelids laying down. But he supposed that if you are Ricky Goldsworth then you can’t risk falling asleep deeply. 

The family walks down to the dining room, a large room with a long wooden table that was enough to fill Jesus and all of his Apostles. Despite the length, there’s almost no occasion where the table is full to the brim. Not even when all of the family was over there was still six empty seats. It was Ricky who sits at the end of the table the same way a king would with his court, and on his left it was Tinsley, who would be foolish to call him his queen when the man can break your arm in a heartbeat; and on his right was the daughter, the heir to the throne with no need of marriage. 

As they were served breakfast, Tinsley was reading the newspaper. The thing about this house was, no matter how elegant and beautiful it was, the signal here is  _ terrible _ . The house was stuck in the 30s with its technology; the house still has a  _ landline _ for God’s sake! The television however does work but not when it’s raining hard enough to confuse as hail against the windows. So reading the newspaper was the closest thing to actually hearing from the outside world. 

“Where are they?” Tinsley asks as he looks up at the maid serving orange juice into his glass cup. 

Ricky knew who the ‘they’ were. “Fast asleep,” he adds quickly. “They had a long trip so they’ll most likely sleep in.” The man, the king, the tiger— he took a sip of his coffee. 

The sound of quick footsteps made both of them look up to see Sophia, their sweet child, late for the first time in years for breakfast. She sits down after flattening her pink dress down. She pulls herself up and picks up her fork to eat. No “good morning”, no smile, no nothing. 

Tinsley and Ricky looked at each other, Ricky’s cup midway to his mouth and was frozen to the position they were in. “You’re five minutes late,” it was Tinsley who was able to talk after looking down at the expensive watch on his wrist that was a gift for his birthday. 

Sophia nods, chewing softly and swallowing gently as if she just breathed. “I’m aware.” That’s all she said. No other questions were asked as she continued to eat, yet her dear parents were struck by the lack of apologies and explanations. 

Out of the corner of Ricky’s eye he sees something shimmering around her neck, he turns to see better. “I’ve never seen you wear that,” he says. It was a necklace, long enough to sit snug on her chest with a long link that seemed to be encrusted with what Ricky would guess were fake diamonds, and right in the center was a pendant that was a pink diamond that was the size of a quarter. 

“It’s new. Scout gave it to me as a gift,” she says simply as she eats her fruit. “I think it looks nice.”

“It’s different,” Tinsley pipes in, meaning it in a good way instead of an unsure way to say to your kid that their drawing is in fact ugly. “It looks good on you.”

The pink girl smile and her eyes shimmered alongside the diamonds on the necklace. Ricky eyes the necklace, an easy feeling filling his body at the sight of it. 

***

Once again Ricky was right. He’s always right, he claims, so you have to be specific about what he was right about. But this has to do with his cousin waking up. They woke up around 9, not that late but enough to feel like you wasted a whole day. 

They sat after the three chairs that have always been used and it’s common sense to not sit there. Scout sitting next to where Sophia would be sitting with both Ryan and Shane across her, eyes sleepy and hair a mess. Enough to look like they have crawled through the woods to civilization again. 

“Thank you,” grumbles Shane as the maid serves him coffee. The maid nods, accepting the gratitude like a meal she has been craving. Working in a mansion leads you to be treated like the scum of the earth. 

The maid, a soft young thing and new to her job, hurries away with a platter of food in her hands which will be Mister Ryan’s breakfast but she was too much of a hurry to see the oncoming girl who she would crash in. Green of the spinach in the eggs stained Sophia’s pink dress, leaving a stain that looks like it would take ages to wash out. “I’m so sorry, Miss,” the maid bows her head as she gets on her hands and knees to pick up the broken plate and on the food on the floor with a rag. 

Sophia was a kind girl, never has she yelled at someone and she thought that anger was a silly emotion that is useless to feel in a situation you can simply talk it out. But a new feeling close in around her, like the walls crushing her and limiting the air for a second before it fades. “It’s okay,” she finally says, that sick and horrible feeling in her stomach fades. “I’ll wash it off myself.”

“No! No no no. I’ll do it myself. By hand,” the maid says as she looks at the dress and her shoes and anywhere but her boss’s daughter. “It’ll get ruined in the washer.” 

Sophia feels herself soften, which is strange, because she has never felt tense before. “Alright. Thank you.” And the pink diamond shimmered for red for a second. 

  
  



	4. Day 4– Fallen angel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The devil now has a name.

In the beginning, it was empty on earth. It was just a chunk of dirt and elements and dust that has been pulled closer and closer by the gravitation of the soon to be sun. Put the reason why these elements, all of these things that needed to be done was by a little push from the Almighty. 

People— humans weren’t wrong or right when it came to do with how the world started. Both sides were right: it was the Almighty and science combined. You see, this all powerful being was rather bored of Her creations in Heaven. The universe was a side project that no other angel knee about. Not even the Archangels. 

The Almighty pushed the needed materials into the same area and stood back to watch would happen. That’s how the universe and everything humanity knows about came around to exist. 

Once the Universe was created, it was too late for the Archangels to stop their Almighty. There was a sense of betrayal in them: Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, Raphael and the finally Lucifer. Every single one of these beings their souls filled with betrayal but none of them were as hurt as Lucifer. Always have been treated as the favorite of the Almighty but this has been the first time She didn’t tell Lucifer about everything. 

The youngest has always been the favorite. 

With a new feeling revolving in the deeps of this Archangel’s core, a plan grew and was created. Lucifer whispers to their closest friends about how strange the Almighty was acting about this, how She has never spoken to not even Her closest allies about this project that was revolutionary. And all of the angels that Lucifer had spoken to started to believe it; believe it because it was a fact and not a rumor. 

The revolution grew like a tree, up and high into the air until finally someone had to cut down the tree. The tree was burned down the same way Lucifer felt their skin burn once they fell. The Almighty expelled Her favorite from Heaven alongside their followers to show what it means to disobey. 

Falling from Heaven is a feeling that does not have a name. It is an emotion that you have to live through to truly know what it is like. It is the feeling of freedom and betrayal as you feel the wind cut your skin, it is the feeling of cold liberty alongside the boiling hot feeling of your wings being burned away to only leave behind a sick scar. But was it better to fall and have your wings-- the thing that made you holy and beautiful -- ripped from your skin and be left with them, stained with the sins that would make humans cry for mercy on their knees? Which one is worse?

When Lucifer landed in the new Earth, it was the space between the First Day and the Day Before that. The space where they crawled under the dry desert sand and waited. Because that’s all you can do. Under the sand, they hide but heard all of their followers hit the ground around them. Many of them whimpering and screaming in agony, feeling the pain more instantly that Lucifer themself, not used to be ripped by the limited power they had and only exposed to how weak and vulnerable they in fact were. Lucifer didn’t come up from the sand under it was the end of the First Week. 

They had heard about the First Man and First Woman. Beautiful creatures that were molded like angels but just so much raw and warmer and more beautiful than even imagined. The Fallen Angel slithered across the sand and under the wall that kept the inside beautiful. The Serpent curled under the wall and into the luscious garden that they knew was created hand-made by the Almighty Herself. Every tree and plant served a purpose to feed (feeding was a fascinating concept), luscious greenery that looks oh-so beautiful. They slither amongst the tall grass, not shy or in hiding but just going along to wherever they wanted to go. 

Slowly it curled up a tree in the center of the garden, a large tree that stood up and high enough to cover the sun.  _ I remember when the Almighty created the sun.  _ Lucifer curls and hides amongst the trees, the leaves left shade on them before curling up a branch to see a bright yellow fig. A fig the color of the sun, bright yellow with somewhat inviting brown spots that promise a sweet taste. An idea grew. 

Lucifer leans into the fig and with the light flicker of their tongue against the fruit. The sound of someone walking towards the tree grew closer but they didn’t move. The crunching of the tall grass get closer and closer to see someone— one of the humans. A woman who they would later recall being naked. This human looked like the closest thing to the face of the Almighty. A wide nose and large hair that defied the laws of gravity and skin that has been kissed by the sun like a lover who will never get satisfaction. Lucifer hisses as the Woman leans up to look at them, never have seen a creature so strange. The fallen hisses into the Woman’s face a secret about the fruit: it has something powerful. 

“What’s power?” she asks. 

Lucifer hisses again.  _ The truth. Why are you here? Don’t you want to know? _

The Woman blinks slowly, never have been asked before but suddenly thinking about it too deeply. What  _ was _ her purpose to be here? She and Adam were never told why they were here in this strange place. Now she wants to know. The feeling of want was new— like a new emotion that would later be described as a sin.  _ Greed _ . 

The Woman reaches for the fruit, snapping it off the branch with a satisfying pop. She smells the fruit and it was suddenly filled with delicious possibilities that she never knew were possible. Eve takes a bites and feels the juice explode in her mouth, it rolling down her chin and down her body, suddenly the feeling it going cold shocked her. 

When she opens her eyes, those brown eyes showed the exposure, the facts: the truth. 

  
  
  
  


Million of years later, Lucifer was under the earth again and waited. Waited with patience that would be the drive of insanity for others. They sneaks around under the feet of humans. Sweet and beautiful, sick and disgusting humans. Lucifer had grown attached to these humans, nothing like the Almighty who had turned Her back to humanity at the first sign of getting offended by the creature She had made. 

Bitch. 

Then something beautiful happened. Absolutely wonder in the sense that it was a change that this fallen angel had waited for.  _ A host.  _ Lucifer slithers to the feeling of a weak aura, the first host that they had had for centuries and craves the feeling of the sun on the skin of their host. The sun was the closest thing to God anyways. 

Quick and swift they arrive in a home in the murky, foggy town of New Orleans. It was the closest to the Garden that the fallen angel has felt in such a long time. 

They crawl up from under the ground through the crack of the wooden floors and found themselves in a little girl’s room. Small and with a bed only there to fill the limited space that was left. They twist and takes the form of a shadow, raising from the ground to see down at the host. A little girl with the face of the Woman millions of years ago. But purple and blue marks all over the small body makes the fallen angel hiss in an emotion that they know they will feel. The shadow twists to sink down into the body and feels the nerves light up little candles. 

The host— Lucifer gasps as  _ she _ sits up from the flat bed. 

The Devil’s name is now Francesca Norris. 


	5. Day 5– Crown of Thorns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raw and human

The Devil never meant to be in a body so young. The last time she had a body it was the year 1795. It was the dying years of the French Revolution yet she remembers the death of her host— a young woman by the name of Charlotte Corday, an assassin who killed a journalist. Yet it wasn’t under the influence of Lucifer, the fallen angel was simply living amongst the white blood cells that run through the girl’s body. She was just there to pass the time. However, Lucifer did feel her host’s death. The blade of the guillotine falling and slicing her head off was an awakening, jerking out of the body once the source of what kept the girl going was gone the fallen angel had fallen out. The Devil lived on the blood soaked streets before it was cleaned away into the gardens. 

But now she lived in the body of a young girl who was the age of six. Six. The unholy number, was what Lucifer later would learn when the mother of this body would take her to church. She didn’t burn up when she took a step into the church as you would believe. In fact, there wasn’t even a moment of discomfort in the house of God. She, like any other child would, got bored. 

Living as this young girl wasn’t as difficult. She just stayed quiet— her mother wouldn’t listen to her anyway — and all she had to do was stay out of trouble and receive the beating when she did mess up. 

The woman was similar enough to be confused by the Almighty. Egoistic, self centered, abusive to the lower lifeforms that She had created. It didn’t bother Lucifer. 

When summer came around, the Devil had discovered that she has a sister. A sister with the same hair type but different nose, and the Devil found herself caring for this girl. They don’t share a birthday, Freddy (her sister’s name) is older than her by a year but the fallen angel is taller. 

They played under the sun in the yard with the clouds just whispering them sweet nothing like a promise for a longer day. The Devil smiles at her sister. The feeling of having something like… you is different. It’s soft and calm and warm like the sun.  _ The sun was the closest thing to God anyways.  _

Freddy and the Devil watched the television in the living room, sitting on the rug because the couch was too hard to be comfortable. Lucifer had began to like this body. It was small and loose and somehow she didn’t feel like a nuisance. She wasn’t in the bloodstream, she was in the brain and soul. She was in the middle. 

Because she and Francesca’s body was one in the same. Fused together. Francesca Norris was indeed the Devil. 

***

High school was indeed something that was a unique experience. Hormonal and sticky and sweaty, the smell of a bunch of teenagers was an experience that she was not used to but it was the same feeling as any other human children have to this new environment. 

Does she even count as human? She is in a human body and if she took a DNA test then it would come back as a human. But what makes her human? Is it the blood or is it the brain? The pumping lungs in her chest? Or was it something more— something raw and sticky that connected them together. 

The Devil winces when she feels something hit her on her back. She turns around and sees that someone threw a pea at her in the cafeteria. Obviously she was sitting alone. “Hey! Weirdo!” someone yells before the feeling of someone coming back behind her to stand across from her on the other side of the table. “What’s with that hair of yours? You look like an old, dirty mop.”

People giggle around them. Francesca swallows and doesn’t answer. Bullying was a concept that she wished she had invented but also dreaded the idea that humans created something so cruel for the most superficial details. 

Francesca looks up at the person— a guy with snowy hair and freckles with eyes like the clear sky. He would have been beautiful if he wasn’t so evil.  _ Hmm! The Devil calling someone evil is rich irony.  _ Again she doesn’t answer him. 

“What? Mute too?” He asks as he leans in really close to her face. 

The Devil looks up at his eyes and smiles slowly, wide and showing off perfectly white teeth. “No. But you stutter,” she states. 

“Wuh-weird b...bitch.” The boy says before turning pale with confusion. “W… what did you do-do to me?” He asks as he touches his mouth 

The day continued with whispers and the boy crying in the nurse’s office. 

***

More rumors grew like a balloon, exhale into the balloon until it pops. The rumors included some that were almost spot on while others were just plainly insane. One of them was that the reason why she has so many perfect scores was because she was fucking her teachers— both men and women. It’s insane because none of them were attractive. If they were then yes she’ll fuck them. Another one was that she was a witch. 

That was close enough that it made Francesca sweat under her clothes. It was that or the hormones of the growing human woman body going into heat like animals. But the witch theory came after she made a girl throw up after she touched her hair without her permission after she had told her to stop. To be fair, can you blame her?

But the rumors still continued even with a boyfriend. A kind boy with chocolate eyes and brown skin. A soccer player who was so nice, dragging his knuckles against her skin as a way to show her that he loved her. He loved her so much but never said it to her. The Devil never has loved someone. 

The boy’s name was Thomas, and she kissed him under the streetlight close to her house before she ran back home before it began to rain. Then the boy kisses her in a place she’ll always remember in the back of his car in the movie theater parking lot. 

She said goodbye to him the night he left for college and she kisses him softly like a promise to never forget her. As if she wants to be remembered. 

***

Francesca didn’t go to college but she did get powerful. She worked hard and knew what to do to be rich. No matter how dirty and cruel the way to get there. Because that’s what humans do. 

The work she did to get where she is now defines her as evil and cruel. She’s responsible for kills that she didn’t do by her hands but does it have it metaphorically. She’s responsible for the selling of children to others for who knows what they want. 

She never really liked children. But this is her throne. Her place. Her palace where she can control every single string— she’s a spider. The Devil. The soul that is made of bloodied gold. Rich enough to control every politician in the state. But all of this… 

It was like she was royalty. Lucifer was there when royalty was invented and even was a king the day before that king died. It was a nice day filled with silk clothing and hot food and even a beautiful wife that the Devil enjoyed touching and she seemed to be enjoying too. 

She wore her crown of thorns. Feeling the blood rolling down her temple but it doesn’t hurt. Is the pain on the skin hers or of others she had hurt? 

The Devil didn’t see the son of God die. She was too hurt to see the Almighty cry for that child She made but not for her. For Lucifer, the child that rebelled again her Creator because she wanted to know the truth because of why.  _ Why? Why are we here? Why did you make us? Why why why why why—  _

God cried for the loyal child, the blind one that did what he was told. The one that was foolish enough to be nailed to the cross for the sins of humanity with his own crown. 

Now here she is. In a party as she watched the man that she adores as much as she adores her dear sister. Ricky was the most human human she has ever met. Raw and soulful. Francesca could take a bite out of his soul and it would be the best meal of her immortal life. 

Huh. 

It turns out that she was right, she and the Devil were one in the same. 


	6. Day 6– Doppelgänger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stranger things have happened, they suppose

In this life, there is full of so many strange things. Bizarre and unusual. The chance for you to be alive is so slim that your existence is a miracle to even consider. And science has worked hard to expose and try to explain how this world we live in works. Sometimes we don’t have the answers; sometimes we do. All we know is that this world is truly something strange.

Science can explain many things. Such as why we revolve around the sun and why it gets cold in winter. That’s the things it can explain. However, there’s things we can’t explain. Such as why there’s seven people in this world that looks like us. Seven. A strange and uneven number for someone who has the same face as you. To share the same name is different but still strange. But to share the same face? It’s bone chilling. 

When Sophia and Scout met for the first time, Sophia was ten and Scout was nine (they even share the same birthday month). They were both shy, unsure what to think about this new girl who had the same face with only some minor differences. The pink girl’s skin was paler with the lack of going outside but Scout’s was olive with spending most of her day out in the sun and too much of it stained her skin; there was also a scar on Scout’s jaw that showed years of fights while the pink girl’s face was clear with no sign of scars or even acne— absolutely nothing. Their hair cuts differed as well, short for practicing sport and then Sophia’s long hair to show grace and beauty. 

Polar opposites with exactly the same face. Shane has said that God had copy-and-pasted Sophia’s face on Scout’s body as a universal joke to the kids that would be within a fifty mile radius. Bumping into someone with the same face is just fucking weird. 

Even though they were on the opposite ends of the fashion and personality spectrum, they got along well enough. Cousins like no other. There were no fights and no petty arguments, no pulling of hair or punching in the arm. Just chasing each other in the yard and Scout scaring Sophia with a worm on a stick. 

It was a weird childhood. 

***

“I’m older than you,” the pink girl says one day when they were in her room, doing everything and nothing as they stare at the ceiling to talk. Like any 12 year old would. 

Scout sighs. “Yeah, by a couple of days!”

“But I’m still older,” she says as she looks down at her from the edge of the bed, seeing that the other girl was lying on the floor despite the bed being big enough for four of them. 

“By leap years,” Scout corrects. “I’m a leap year baby. I was born on the 29th of February— the worst birthday ever.” Having such birthday includes not sure if you should celebrate it on the 28 or on the first of March. It also includes trying to explain it to paperwork because apparently many people weren’t born on such days. It was particularly strange because it makes you far more younger than others around you. She’s technically only four years old. 

Sophia looked down at her before crawling down, the ruffling on her dress making a rich noise againsts the bedding. She sits down next to Scout, not used to the view sitting on the floor makes the room feel. It gives out the illusion that riches around them was above them, that they were unworthy of such golden opportunities. Scout was putting herself lower to the riches in this house, not touching anything with the fear it might break, having the wealthy look down at her and accepting that she was never going to reach such things.

“What do you want to do with your life?” Sophia asks the existential question that would make any high schooler throw up. 

Scout shrugs. “I don’t know yet. What about you?”

“Well. I’ve been studying medical books lately so maybe…” A nurse? A doctor? A pediatrician? “I want to be a neurosurgeon.”

The younger chokes on her own spit and sits up to clear her throat as she turns to face her with large eyes of disbelief. “What the fuck? What did you do? Binge watch  _ Grey’s Anatomy _ ?”

Sophia cocks her head like a curious dog. “As in the book? I’ve already read most of it.”

She shakes her head. “No. The Tv show.” 

“Oh! There’s a television program for it?”

Jesus Christ was this girl absolutely brilliant but she can be naive most of the time. Scout sighs. “Yeah. You know what? Never mind. I know what I want to do with my life.”

Hope shone in Sophia’s eyes like the moonlight against the ocean. Lighting up with wonderful possibilities that will bring fortune and fame. “Well what is it?”

Scout sighs as she slowly lays back down on her back, pressed against the cool wooden floor. “I want to live my life.” 

***

Around those years too young to be taken away into the one month trip and to be left alone, both Shane and Ryan agreed to leave Scout in her cousin’s and uncle’s home for the month. Ricky would drive her personally to school in order to not cause suspicion about a dark, slick car is driving around an eight grader to school. It consisted of waking up a bit earlier and then leaving, having Sophia home alone with the maids and Tinsley. It was a solid week or so of no one really asking questions about why a man in a suit is dropping her off. The following week there were only a few questions such as: “where are your parents now?” and the answer would always be  _ on work. _ No one really cared to ask questions, which was a blessing and a curse at the same time. 

It, however, changed when it was the third week and Sophia grew antsy with the knowledge that her dear cousin is going to school while she’s at home with a tutor when she can be  _ interacting _ . After begging her father to take her with him to go pick her cousin up. “It will be crowded,” Sophis says. “No one will see us.” After long consideration and some help from Tinsley, saying that it would do her good to see the outside world, if only for an hour. Ricky sighs and nods. 

The following day, both father and daughter were inside that car and Sophia would not stop looking out the window, eyes peeled open at every sound and any quick movement. Never has she thought that so many birds can fit on a wire. Sophia has never seen so many kids walking around and leaving early. No one can pull her away from the brick building and how the sound of a bell rang, indicating the release of all of the kids. Gasping at the sea of kids, never has she imagined so many people in this building, especially when it was kids her own age. Yes, she was educated and knew statistics of how many children are in the U. S but to see such a fraction of it unfold in front of her eyes was… new. 

Ricky was ready to step out of the car for a smoke, ignoring the fact that this is a school zone but froze when he heard the car door open and saw Sophia poked her head to look at the people as closely as she can without being seen. “Get you head back inside,” he says and Sophia hesitated, waiting for a second longer to see but reluctantly sitting back down inside the car, closing the door as softly as she could. 

Ricky closes his own door and steps out, leaning against the car door, his eyes going back and forth from the school and waiting for his niece and his daughter who seemed to be acting a fool for the day. Finally when the sight of Scout walking towards the car filled his eyes he felt himself relax a tiny bit, waiting for her to walk close enough to unlock the car. 

“What? Someone scratched your paint job?” Scout asks as she opens the backseat’s door and puts her bag in. 

He didn’t answer and no one talked the ride home. 

  
  


Many of you may be wondering if both of these girls are so similar, strikingly so, then why don’t they check if they are indeed sisters. And the problem is that: they’ve checked already. Sophia is Ricky Goldsworth’s daughter and heir by literal blood while Scout is an adopted kid who just happened to meet her long lost look-alike. Doppelgangers, they call them. Seeing them is a sign of you soon to come death. But no one knows why these such things exist. Some say it's just a scientific marvel while others speculate that there is something out there, something not so human. 

These two are not related by blood. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb; yet the soul is the root of all connections. 

***

The following school day, the question of  _ whose car was that? _ popped up unexpectedly. Scout was bombarded by the constant question “So who was in that car? Who’s car is that? Do you have a sister? Aren’t your parents on a trip?”

It was a strange day.

“So… you don’t have a sister?” it was Tyler who managed to get that question out. Scout sighs as she stabs her mashed potatoes with the plastic spork. 

“No,” she says. “I don’t have a sister. You have no idea how many times that question popped up in my class today.” Rumors grew quickly as if seeing someone who looks like you is the next spotting of a celebrity or if Bigfoot decided to enroll in school. Such ridiculous rumors were: Her parents abandoned her and she began to live with a royal family after they discovered that they had another daughter; or that she was the heir of a billionaire who conducted cloning experiments and got two of the same child; or that she’s going to switch identities with that lookalike and run away to France; and finally the one that is a fucking doozie-- Scout is going to die soon and that the school had witnessed her meeting with her doppleganger. 

Yikes. 

“She’s my cousin. I’m staying with her for the month while my parents are out of town working,” Scout explains. “And yes. We look the fucking same but we alredy took a DNA test. No, we aren’t related. I just thing genes repeated themselves and I ended up looking like her. You know, I had a white dad and hispanic-asian mom and my cousin has an asian-hispanic dad and a white mom so who knows.”

“It’s still freaky though,” Skylar says. “When did you two meet?”

Scout shrugs. “When the ink was fresh on the papers, I guess.”

Fucking weird but stranger things have happened, they both suppose. 


	7. Day 7– Saw Too Much

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ten.

_ Speak no evil.  _

Scout grew up with the hands over her mouth, the promise to never say a word about what she is seeing with those soft eyes that would turn sad and tired in the following years to heal scars. 

Josh was slapped when he talked back, defending a woman who had a broken nose from the hands of his father. He was slapped hard enough to bite his own mouth, having the blood drip down his lips; it stained the telephone when he called the police on his own blood. 

It was a surprise that Sophia didn’t cut out her own tongue to keep her father safe, the thought of it lingered in the back of her brain just in case something would happen to him and Tinsley. She’s willing to do anything to not speak a word about what she—

_ Hear no evil.  _

“Cover your ears.” Was the soft whisper that Ricky exhales when he pulls out the gun from his coat, pointing at the outline of a man through the darkness. Sophia, young and foolish, did so. She felt the gunshot vibrate her fingernails and made the skin in her arms prick up with nerves reacting to run, in fear of being hurt. It was Ricky who pulled her up and patted her down, fixing her hair, smoothing it down with the smell of gunpowder on his fingers. “It’s okay. We’re going home, child.” She nods as she sees the outline of blood dripping around the body; she didn’t hear the scream and the thud. 

Scout was young and stupid, beautiful with a wide smile to show the artificial happiness that she was fed, the spoonful of the plastic sensitivity missed her mouth at some point. The Devil curls her nails around her shoulders, making her arms come up to cover her ears: “Count, Mira. I’ll go hide.” She covers her ears and closes her eyes, counting in a muffled language in her own mouth, a language that was forced on her tongue, and it was wrapped up in sweetness so she can swallow the shame easier than usual. With her eyes closed and ears covered, she didn’t hear the phone call about the slaughter that made the bees make honey red with the blood spilled into the garden. 

Music pumps into the air and he throws up with the fear pumping into him like air into a balloon. The sound of yelling should have been drowned by the walls and the music, picking up the volume so he could feel it in his chest with the hope to replace that with the heart that he knows will darken like smoke into a pair of lungs. Josh squeezes his eyes shut, screaming the lyrics back when the screaming on the other side of the wall was getting louder and louder and louder—

_ Do no evil.  _

One of Sophia’s worst fears is that the feeling of her wrist will no longer be heavy with golden bracelets and silver rings but with the chimes and clicks of handcuffs. That one day her father would go truly insane and they’ll take him away and away and… She’ll end up alone. Eyes wide with shock and terror when the lumbering tall man that she looked up to so much will be cut down into a pool of red. 

All his life he couldn’t do much to help people. Locked in a classroom and his hands out and up. He showed his palms up to the teacher before the feeling of something harsh and sharp hit him. Josh’s eyes fill with tears of pain as another hit made him wince. He tried to pull away his hand but they were forced to stay. Think red lines grow, the sharp edge of the ruler cutting him enough to be mistaken for falling off the swings. Josh sniffles; all he tried to do was help. 

A numbing sleep washed over her body, a sleep that will kill you. Laying in a nice bed but with an evil soul standing over her like any child’s rendition of their boogeymen. This woman was the Master of All Boogeymen. Scout would have flinched if she hear the banging on the other side of the wall. The screams of mercy and the cries of help, banging like the wall had hope of breaking. BANG BANG BANG— 

** _S E E NO EVIL _ **

“Close your eyes and count to ten, okay?” A chorus of agreement comes back in return, the sound of children who don’t know what they will become. Hands over their eyes as they wait for their orders. Obedient. Numb. Controlled. 

_ One _ . The Devil whispers into her ear and told her to move along and leave her with her work.  _ Two.  _ She nods as she leaves, walking past the men and women in suits with their eyes following her as she closes the door.  _ Three.  _ Scout— no, Mira waits outside the door, waiting for some orders. Her eyes wander down the hallway, feet moving forward to play with the shadow that moves across the walls.  _ Four. _ The shadow screams down the hall, words that shake the bones with the misery that only the child can see. 

_ Five.  _ The paperwork was not usual. His mom doesn’t do paperwork. Josh walked into the kitchen, in the middle of the night with the intention to walk across the tile floor for something as innocent as water.  _ Six.  _ Josh’s eyes landed on the papers left on the table. Open, wide, naked to expose numbers of someone else’s life. He turns the other way, suddenly not thirsty. 

_ Seven.  _ She has never asked about her father’s work. When Tinsley came around to be the second father and someone whom she can actually speak to, she was always by his side.  _ Eight.  _ One of the very few days that he was simply too sick to be with someone, Sophia was left alone. The empty house clicks with a threat of silence, wanting to consume itself like a black hole. Being too young, the pink girl’s imagination ran wild. The clock stopping and hands coming out, screams from the basement haunt her dreams, people searching for her to— Sophia ran down the stairs to the place she’s not allowed to be in.  _ Nine.  _ A panic consumes her as she pulls the door open and feels everything freeze inside her. Blood. So much blood. And her father. A scream gets caught in her throat as he eyes roll back and falls. 

_ Ten.  _


	8. Day 8– Brainwashing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Father knows best,

**Brainwashing **

_ noun  _

_ The process of pressuring someone into adopting radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible means.  _

  
  
  


The concept of brainwashing seems something fake, fictional and something that the movies have seemed to fabricated. But it is a reality, not exactly as it seemed to be in the movies but the type that gets under you skin and crawl up to your brain. The type that Manson used for his family yet managed to still have blood on his hands. The type that the movies seemed to zoom past and just show the small terrifying parts and not the process of what it does to the body and mind. 

Despite the concept of being brainwashed seems scary, painful; but there has been cases where even everyday people have been influenced by their bosses, people they know and even commercials that come on tv. Children tend to be easy targets. 

Ricky’s hand is on his wrist, squeezing it lighty like it was a promise. His thumb rubs against the golden bracelet that was a gift for Christmas. It was a soft moment, a soft thing that no one else can feel besides them. After years of being together, Tinsley has thrown his life away for this man. He left his job, he left the life he had built for a man that he loves. He loves him so much that it was a feeling that drowns him under the golden waters of wealth and comfort. Tinsley, before he ran off, was writing letters to him; back and forth like old lovers. Ricky has always been the romantic one. The letters were his idea, not wanting to attract attention from a telephone company. God, he remembers when he received the first letter. 

Tinsley smiles at him, looking up from his book. “What is it?” he asks and then looking down at his book again. He remembers in one of the letters he sent that Tinsley called himself a trophy husband, having such criminal messing with a detective with intent. Now it seems that the poor little detective was right. 

“Nothing. I’m just thinking,” Ricky says as he looks at him through his eyelashes. Ricky then looks up at the ceiling when he hears some hurrying down the stairs with a hurry. The tiger sits up and sees Sophia hurrying to look around the living room. Under the couch, the cushions and then under the wingback chair Tinsley was sitting on. 

He looks at Ricky and then back at the small child. “Did you lose something?” Tinsley asks as Sophia moves to look at the dining room. 

“I’m looking for my embroidery kit,” she says. “I can’t find it in my room.” 

“I’ll get you a new one if you indeed lost it,” Ricky offers. “I’m heading into the city anyways.” The city was not far, a twenty minute drive if the traffic was a bit heavy. The Goldsworth Manor was in a small,almost-suburban neighborhood where everyone around them were as wealthy as the other. It wasn’t a gated community but it was rich enough for people to not even bother crossing the imaginary border that cut off the middle class and the extremely upper class. 

Sophia looks up, face flushed with running. “No, just misplaced it I suppose. But… I like to come. With you.” 

Ricky was already standing up before the words even left her mouth, towering over her like a threat that hung in the air. “We’ve talked about this, child. You’re not ready to go outside.” Tinsley stares up at him while the girl looks down at her feet, striking down the confidence she’s been trying to get up for who knows how long. 

The little detective never really understood why she wasn’t allowed out. Not going out alone is understandable, it is for any parent but she is going with Ricky or him so why not go into the city like a family. He never really commented about how he raises her but there are some points where he simply has to ask  _ why.  _

“I’ve told you what’s outside and you know. I know you know and understand why I don’t let you out,” Ricky scolds with his voice harsh but not jarring enough to make a child cry. “What have I said about outside?” he asks her. 

Sophia had scrunch back, looking down at the floor. “That it’s dangerous,” she mumbled. She was dumb and young, eight years old at the time of this event. “That… that there’s people out there that will hurt me.” Her voice small, pitiful with the pain of being yelled at. 

Ricky sighs as he rubs his face, index finger and thumb rubbing his eyes like in the old films. All of his behavior was stripped out from the films, he took pieces of such things to make himself look high and mighty. Years of educating himself to be someone else that the street rat he was. Ricky reaches to touch her face, pulling her chin up to look down at her. She was definitely his child. “I’ll let you out with me once you turn twelve. Aright? That’s we agreed on, right, child?” he whispers a soft promise, possibly empty. He dangled the idea of freedom right in front of her face as a prize to be won if she’s good. 

And she has to be good for now on. 

Sophia nods, face up but eyes down like she was taught to do when an adult talks to you. 

The tiger smiles, a sharp smile that would make anyone’s stomach knot up. “That’s good. I’ll get you a kit once I’m in the city, okay?”

“Yes, sir,” she says, a monotone voice came from her mouth. 

“Now go on,” Ricky shoos her away and sees her quickly go up the stairs, not looking back with the hope of a sudden change of heart. She knows it won’t happen. He sighs once he no longer see her and he backs up to sit in Tinsley’s lap. His head landed on his collarbone under his shirt. “What am I going to do with her?”

This was his chance to speak up. To say something, to say that this was mildly messed up. “Ricky, you say that as if she’s a junkie. All she wants to do is go past the fence for God’s sake,” he did speak his mind for the first time in years around this man that he loves so much but can’t find himself speak to about opinions and the philosophy of child raising. 

“You don’t know what my childhood was like,” Ricky mumbles, all of the sudden shy. “I would have  _ killed  _ for safety in a house such as this. I would have done anything to have the comforts in life.”

“Well is it really living if you’re not uncomfortable?” Tinsley points our. “You’re supposed to explore and experience. All she has felt was silk dresses and fancy parties filled with champagne.”

Ricky sighs and rubbed his face the same way he did to Sophia, making the Detective feel like the child for the moment. “I’ll… I suppose you’re right. But I’m also right as well. She does need friends.” 

Tinsley sighs himself and wrap his arms around his waist. “She does. Any child needs a companion. Not be cooped up in a big empty house.”

The tiger hums and closes his eyes. Tinsley was right, she does need to know what the real world is like. One day she has to leave the nest. But that day isn’t today or soon enough. Ricky’s brain began to stir up a plan, a way to keep her inside for a while before she can shake out that idea. 

_ The world is horrible,  _ he makes her say growing up. 

_ You’ll get hurt,  _ Ricky whispers to her as he brushes her hair. 

_ People want to make you cry. Only trust me and Tinsley. Only us.  _

_ “Only us,”  _ she repeats till this day and she’s never ever getting rid of those words in her head. He has her by the leash. 


	9. Day 9– Eaten From The Inside Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A heat in the core

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is actually a medical issue that I have where my body overheats but turns cold when I’m in a cold place so if you have these same symptoms talk to your doctors

There are different types of heats in this world. There’s the wet heat where it’s mixed with humidity when it comes to do with living near a body of water. And then there’s the dry heat, the type where the sun is unforgiving and burning your skin the moment you step out of the shade, the type where all of the air seemed to be sucked out of the atmosphere and all you have left is the heat. And honestly, he doesn’t know which one is worse. 

After years of living in Chicago, where the sun is hot but not hot enough to make his skin peel off completely, where the winters are cold and harsh and is what people worry about the most about. He does miss the breeze and the snow days where he and his brother would sneak out to play with the snow. Shane does miss those days. 

But now he’s in the hot, sunny state of California. The state of Hollywood, actor rejects and plastic surgery. He remembers leaving home, packing his bags and saying goodbye to his brother and parents before going on the plane. The flight was a blur as he fell asleep for most of it. Shane does remember getting out of the airport and feeling the heat hit him so hard that it knocked the air out of his, within twenty minutes he had to take off his jacket by the sheer heat of the sun. it was the driest heat he has ever felt, making him sick and just sucking the moisture out of his body like goddamn lake. 

The first years of living in L. A was the years of having three jobs and a high electricity bill because of the fucking A/C. He was so hot in the apartment that he was fanning himself with a plastic plate and his shirts were drenched in the sweat he didn’t even know were possible or even healthy to sweat out. It was the worst thing he has ever felt. Shane had came to the conclusion that he would rather live in the Arctic Circle than actually live here. 

Shane Madej was new in town (not really), hot and needed money. The following day he had up an ad about a roommate. A day went on and nothing, the third day passed and nothing either. It wasn’t until the week had passed that Shane was ready to look for a new and cheaper apartment, even without an A/C, was when Ryan walked into his life like the sweet surprise of candy after a long month of a diet. 

Since day fucking one, they were inseperable. 

Now they have their own YouTube channel, taking trips all over the state (and hopefully around the world soon), having the internet pay for the rent of a still small apartment but still bigger than the last few they have shared, a kid who they both claim isn’t their kid. They’re living a good life under the sun. 

***

Shane sighs as he feels the A/C hit him in the best way. It was one of those hot days that he swore that one day he’s going to wake up and maybe there’s going to be a chill in the air to remind him of when the Fall was knocking on his door with sweater weather and rain and warm coffee that doesn’t boil his insides. 

It was the day before the big trip. A month on the road in a hot sweaty car and sticky beds and cheap food. He’s actually happy that Scout doesn’t have to come with them because even if he isn’t a hormonal preteen then he still gets pissed off and wants to cry on these trips. 

He gets up from the bed and goes on his routine, remembering it in his bones and will always do so when he’s dead. There are two bathrooms in the apartment, both small but bathroom still. One by the living room where Scout using it and the one that connects his and Ryan’s room. Shane yawns as he knocks on the door, not wanting to repeat what happened when they first moved to the apartment when he walked into Ryan taking a shower. Nothing from inside the bathroom. 

Shane opens the water for his shower, taking the last good shower he’s going to have for a long time. The moment the warm water hit his back he sighs. Wetting his hair and washing it quickly before just basking into the feeling of it. Shane frowns when he feels the water feel hotter. Huh, maybe Scout woke up and was brushing her teeth. He leans down to turn on the cold water more and lessens the hot water.  _ Still too hot.  _

He gets out, suddenly overly warm and turns off the water and he saw that there was barely Ah hot water in his stream. Weird. 

Putting his hands on the sink and he groans at the feeling of cool tile against hot skin. His palm suddenly so warm that he can feel the temperature difference so sharp like needles and like entering the pool while having a fever. In fact, Shane did feel as warm as having a fever. He clears his throat and tries to search for some pain. Nothing. 

Getting out and changing quickly before going to the kitchen, the second largest room in the apartment with the living room being the biggest. Shane searches for the thermometer that was in the vase of fake fruit that Ryan had insisted on buying to make himself feel like home when they first moved in together, now the stupid fake fruit had followed them everywhere. Shane fishes it house and checks himself, sitting in the kitchen as the sound of someone waking up makes his eyes move to see the outline of Scout getting into the bathroom. 

Strange. 

The thermometer beeps, pulling it out and looking down at it to see 98.3. Not bad. Not too hot. Maybe he’s just hot. Shane puts the thermometer back after cleaning it, his hands sore from the heat in the palms— he felt sick. Maybe he’s coming down with something. 

  
  
  


Breakfast was hot. So hot that Shane was sweating under his shirt and he can’t even stand it. He feels so sick he can’t even be in the kitchen for so long. Shane excuses himself after a while and he sits down on his bed, laying on his back while looking at the fan spinning and the A/C on a blast. 

The sound of the door opening made Shane lookup, pink and blushing with the heat that he’s drowning in. He feels hot to the palm of his hands to the sole of his feet and under the skin where the bone and flesh meet. 

Ryan sinks into the bed with him. “Are you okay?” he asks. He’s seen him sick before, he was there when Shane had the flu and made him soup and put a rag on his head every other hour. Maybe he does have the flu. 

But this didn't even feel similar to it. This was worst. It was killing him, wanting to pull his skin off with the hope of cooling off. Shane shrugs. “I feel hot. Too hot.” He feels Ryan’s hand on his forehead and he winces, his face just so hot that he can’t even stand it. Ryan’s hand was warm, the warmth of a living human but it was just so  _ cold  _ against his skin. 

It was eating him. He wanted it to end. He can’t stand it. Shane was going to scream as the sweat rolled into the bed and he groans. 

“I think you need an ice bath,” Ryan whispers. Of course he would say that. Any other athlete would say that. 

Shane shakes his head and he groans as the feeling of his brain swirling around in his own skull like an egg yolk in the shell. “I… if you do that my bones will snap in half,” Shane pants with his eyes closed, the image of his bones breaking like a child snapping a piece of chalk under their tiny finger. He groans and coughs. 

Heat. Overheating in this freezing cold room. Years of the sunlight sinking into his bones, waiting until they slowly spill out like an overflowing sink and into his body. The disgusting heat now in his system. Shane sobs when he feels a pair of small hands touching and he wants to scream, the heat was too much. 

It was not the dry heat of California or the wet one from the coat but worst. The sun and lava and volcanoes under his skin to burn him up like a sick joke of those who are cold-bones to their core. It just consumed him. 

The heat eating him up. 


	10. Day 10– Rotting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who am I?

One of the cruelest things in life is having your mother, the woman who had you in her womb for nine months, saying that she doesn’t love you. Any child would grow up lonely and confused about it, it is in the human soul to know what someone is to us. This person is your friend, your enemy, your brother or sister-- your father or your mother. We can feel it in our blood, in our bones and in our nerves. We  _ feel  _ it. Even if the person didn’t birth you or feel the pain of labor or the weight of the belly when she had you inside, you can feel the motherhood that they leak from their skin and like thirsty child you want it.  _ He wants a mother.  _

What makes a child an orphan? Is it the death of both parents or the abandonment of either of them? He knew his father for the first three years of his life and he knew him, well he likes to think that he knew him well. Being a toddler and living with someone that feeds you and plays with you makes you live almost ignorant and selfishly. It doesn’t matter, he’s dead anyways. 

Next was his mother. He never actually met his mother until the funeral. The young boy doesn’t even remember the way he died, all he knew was what someone told him: _ Your father was a brave man, He died a hero. Now you’re going to live your mother. Okay, Vince?  _ He hated being called that. It made him sound like a fucking child. 

He doesn’t recall how long he had been there. He likes to pretend that he was there for another three years before she sent him away up north with a full-time nanny. Her name was Caroline. A soft faced woman who would always play with him, she would let him sleep in her bed when he was scared by the sound of a storm, she would make sure he was okay after a fall and she drove him to the hospital when he broke his arm. It was later when he realized that Caroline didn’t pay the medical bill-- he just suspected it was the government paid it. 

Seven years later, and Caroline is still there for him, the Orphan besided to pay his mother a visit. Mommy Dearest wasn’t home when he got to her large house, the largest he has ever seen with the largest yard with no people in sight. She didn’t have kids after him. But this house was so big, doesn’t she feel lonely when there is no one around to talk to. 

The next best option was her dear friend-- said Mister Ricky Goldsweorth. The butler handed him the address of the man with the fakest name the Orphan has ever heard; and he’s seen a bunch of old movies with Caroline. The home wasn’t far anyways, a walk under the sun that shone like a diamond that the rich can buy. Fuck the rich. 

Fuck his mother. God, he can’t wait until she’s dead and then he’ll be the one that’ll get the money! Fuck this. 

***

After the whole… body meltdown thing, Ryan had to drive Shane to the hospital, worried about what the fuck is happening to his roommate. Ryan had dropped Scout off in Ricky’s place on the way to the hospital and both Ricky and Tinsley went with him. 

The kids were home alone. Well, home alone with the maids on their break. It wasn’t even that late, around six o’clock. Josh had been with Sophia throughout the whole day and now with Scout they were just hanging out in the living room. 

Josh was on the couch, upside down so his hair was faintly touching the carpet. “Woah! I feel the blood rushing to my head,” he says as he looks up and reaches up to get up but comes back. 

Scout rolls her eyes. “Get up before your brain gets smaller than usual under all that blood pressure, you asshat.” She reaches to pull him up but he falls back and lands on the floor, crashing onto the floor on his back with a loud thud. 

He groans as he scrambles to get up and he rubs his tailbone. “Jesus Christ I felt that in my teeth.” Josh squeezed his eyes shut and gets up, he hasn’t had a fall this bad since cheerleading last year. 

“Are you okay?” Trust Sophia into asking and worrying over spilled milk even though she’s the one that is going to pay for it no matter what happens. 

He stands up and sits back down on the soft couch, feeling better but still shaken up from the weird ass fall he had. “Don’t worry about me. I think my last two brain cells actually needed that for me to actually study.” Josh sighed and looked at Scout, was sitting with her legs criss crossed like a child, her fingernails peeling on the loose string that was coming from the couch cushion, seeming too anxious to worry about what that meant. What it means to have someone you grew up looking up to is in the hospital, gnawing feeling that there is something bad going to happen. She can’t lose another parent. 

Josh reaches to touch her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he whispers and he sees her clean her eyes with her fingers as if something was in her eyes. “He probably just has an infection.” 

She sniffles and nods. “Yeah I know. I’m just worried… just don’t tell him I said that.” Josh smiles and Sophia wraps her arms around her waist to comfort her. 

The sound of the door opening echoes into the house like an bang that's not how someone treated this house. This house is something sacred, a church almost. A church that blood rolls under the very foundation of this strange house. It should feel cursed with the people inside it but it is a place where lost souls wander. This is the House of Refugees of the Forgotten. 

Holy Shit, Ricky Goldsworth should be a motherfucking saint. 

But that’s beside the point. Because there is no one opens the door of this place like that. Angry and the energy that entered the place was vibrating with so much bitterness. Fuck. Who is this at their door?

The three of them leave the living room and leaned over to see who was in the large doorway. They see a guy-- a boy of their age standing there. A tall black boy stands there and he just there. Standing like a statue as he waits to see who will come out to see the sound and ruckus was about. 

“Well look who I found here,” his voice cracking with what seems to have emotions in his throat that were not shown on his face. “Two of you I don’t recognize, maybe you’re new here. You must be Joshua—“ he points at the only boy besides him and he was staring at him as if he was a madman. “And you must be Scout. I’ve heard some stuff about you.” She squeezed Josh’s arm when he pointed at her, and she felt the look that he had in his eyes, she knew someone who looked at her like that. “But you… look at you Sophia. You’re certainly grown up. And it seems like your hasn’t thrown you away yet. That’s  _ great! _ ”

Sophia stares at him, mouth and eyes wide with just surprise. She knows him. She knows him so well. They grew up together before she and Scout grew up together. A family friend. “You. It-It can’t be!”

“Well it is,” he says as he steps forward and closes the door behind him, slowly as to not cause a scene. “I grew up and I came back.”

“I… we thought you died,” Sophia was still gaping at him. 

That caused tears to weld up in his eyes. “Oh fuck you! You knew I was alive you bitch.”

“Hey!” Scout says, stepping forward in front of her but was still holding Josh’s arm. “Don’t you dare call her that, you weirdo!”

The Orphan’s eyes wandered to stare her down, those eyes look so familiar to her that it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “You’re calling me a weirdo when you’re the one who looks like her carbon fucking copy.” He took a step forward. 

“Why are you here, Vincent?” she asks. The Orphan now has a name. A name he can call him own and god does he hate being called by his name. 

His eyes filled with more tears, angry and bitter with the sourness of years of being abandoned over so many years. “Where the fuck is she?” he growls. 

“Get out of this house before we call the fucking cops!” Josh says as he pulls Sophia and Scout behind him to block this strange boy from them. 

The threat went to deaf ears as he steps forward some more. “What did she do? Did you guys have fun without me? Did she talk about me? What did you do without me? I’m supposed to be the fun one! But now I’m meeting my fucking  _ replacements! _ ” 

Josh feels Sophia wrap her arm around him. Scout’s eyes dart to the phone in the living room but she can’t move, not right now. This guy just waltzed into the house as if it were his own. “Who the fuck is he?” she asks Sophia, the only one who seems to know who this person was. 

The pink doll’s eyes are still wide but with a fear she has never felt before. Hands are clammy and her stomach churned with disgusting possibilities that well up with blood in the wall. Was this what her father’s victims felt like? She didn’t get to answer her internal question or her cousin’s own question. 

Anger made his face hard and he took a few steps forward and Josh made sure to push them back behind him. “Who am I? I’m the first born. I’m the oldest. I am your forgotten cousin.” Vincent took a step forward and swung a fist to Josh, whose first instinct was to push the girls into the living room before blocking the fist hitting his jaw. He fell back into the floor as the girls let out a scream.

They scatter to go through the living room and through the dining room and into the kitchen. They locked the door behind them and Scout fishes her phone out of her phone. “Shit! Your house doesn’t have fucking service.” She presses her ear against her door and tries to hear the fight. 

Josh scrambles to get up but Vincent pulls him by his shirt to pin him against the wall. “Where the fuck is she?” he hisses through his teeth. The answer was a spit on his face and being kneed in the stomach. 

Vincent falls back, clutching his stomach before being punched across the face. Hard. He went falling down on his side, holding his face and stomach. Josh touches his wrist and winces before running through the living and dining room and he knocks on the locked kitchen door. “Open the door! It’s me Josh.” He waits and is pulled into the kitchen. 

He’s met face to face with Scout with a knife in her hand. “Shh. Shut up. He might hear us.”

Josh stares at her and then at the knife before looking back up at her. “What? You were going to stab him?” he asks her. 

Scout shrugs but her face was too hard. “He’s a stranger who broke into the fucking house! And he also punched you. Are you okay?” 

He nods and touches his face to feel a sharp pain. “I’ll live. Hopefully.” 

Sophia was sitting on the counter and breathes in deeply through her mouth and exhales out of her nose to calm herself down. She’s never felt this fear before. It’s not fear of a horror novel but the fear of being  _ in the novel.  _ The fear of not falling down the stairs but being pushed. This is the fear of being killed. “He can’t be here! He was sent… sent away!” she whispers to herself and jumps when Scout touches her shoulder. 

“Who is he?” she asks her. 

Sophia closes her eyes and remembers being six or seven when he met him. They played all the time. All day and never getting tired. Playing the piano and singing and drawing outside on the patio. He was her childhood. “He’s a family friend. He… he and I played all the time before he moved away. But— But I didn’t know why. I thought he was just misbehaving and they sent him to a school. And then my father told me he died and… oh my God I can’t believe he’s here.”

Her cousins look at each other and Josh rubs her back. “It’s okay. Has ever been violent?” he asks and she shakes her head. “Okay. Then why is he here.” 

She swallows. “This used to be his house. He lived here with… with Miss Norris.”

The hairs on the back of Scout’s neck stand up at the mention of that name. God she hates her. She hates what she did to her. She hates everything to do with the Devil. “Who… who is he to her then?”

Sophia shrugs, looking down. She can’t say. 

They all jumped when there’s a loud bang on the door. BANG BANG BANG. “Open up! Open the fucking door!” Vincent banged again and they step back. 

They look at the other door that leads back to the hallway, in front of the art studio. “We have to go there. One of us have to go upstairs to call the cops.” Josh whispers they move quietly to the door. 

“I’ll go upstairs” Scout offers and she flashes the knife in her hand, a simple kitchen knife but a weapon nonetheless. They whimper when the door was banged on again. “You stay with her, okay?” 

They all nod and Scout inches to the door and creaks the door as quietly as she can. It cracks open and looks out and can hear him still banging on the door. She quickly gets out and closes the door behind her. Slowly she goes up the stairs, stopping when she hears them creak and waits just in case. He didn’t come. 

She zoomed up the stairs and goes into the master bedroom where her uncles sleep in. Scout closes the door and locks his quietly. Her hands were sweaty and her heart was beating so fast she might throw up— but besides that she was okay. She had to be. 

Scout pulls on the phone and dials 911 and waits, buzzing like crazy but it was still too slow. She gasps but slaps her hand over her mouth when she hears the other line pick up.  _ “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”  _

“There’s someone in our house,” she whispers and she looks at the door and tries to calm down her breathing. 

_ “Are you alone?”  _ the operator asks. 

Scout shakes her head but realizes that they can’t see her. She swallows the stone in her throat. “No. My cousins are downstairs. They’re hiding in the kitchen.” 

_ “What’s the address?”  _

Scout squeeze her eyes shut as she tries to calm her breathing down. “It’s… its 3271 Golden Lane, Drive. In Cherry Wood.” 

_ “I’m sending the patrol right now. Is the intruder armed?”  _

“No,” she whispers and she hangs up by pressing the button on the phone to not cause a slamming sound. She stares at the phone and she’s going to be sick. She hasn’t felt this bad since… since— 

Scout dials a number that she had tried to force to forget but it was implemented in her fingertips. She lifts the phone to her ear and waits. 

  
  


Vincent was still banging on the door as Josh hugged Sophia tight. He can’t think, he can’t breathe but he has to be there for her. Josh’s face aches as he feels the bruises begin to come as he bites down on his tongue. 

“Hurry up,” he whispers to himself as he looks at the door that Scout left out of. Then it stops. The banging stops for ten seconds before it starts again and Sophia screams. 

Josh pants as he looks up at the ceiling and his brain just wanted to pray. What is he going to do with them? Is he going to kill them? What does he want?

“OPEN THE DOOR!” Vincent roars and bangs again. “Where is she? Where’s my mother?” 

Everything then dawns on him. Why Sophia can’t speak about and why those eyes look so familiar and why,  _ why _ he was here. 

The banging on the door dies down. “Where’s my mother? Where is she? I just… want to know why. Why did she leave… me?” Vincent whispers, angry and bitter. “Didn’t she want me? Why… why doesn’t she want me? She left. She left me alone. To rot alone and be with someone who wasn’t my mother… when that’s her job.  _ She left me to rot!” _

Josh pants as he hears Vincent sit in front of the door. “I… just wanted to be part of the family again. That’s all I wanted,” he whispers as he bangs on the door weakly. 

  
  


The sound of the door opened again but this time with the respect that it deserved. Scout was walking down the stairs when the door opened and Vincent went out to check it was. 

There she stands. There she was. Francesca Norris. The Devil. A wealthy woman. A woman who is powerful enough to move the sun and moon just because she pleases.  _ His mother.  _

  
  
  



	11. Day 11– Mythical

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Which monster are you?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IGNORE THIS CHAPTER THIS IS A CRACK FIC I WROTE AS JOKE WITH MY FRIENDS

When the world was born, there were such things that were not easy to explain. Why is there only one planet with life? What are the odds that it’s perfect? Why is it perfect? The universe brings on more questions than answers. And when people began to exist, when they slowly grew legs and crawled out of the water and turned into what is considered the first actual humans. The Christians were right, there were two first people on this earth: Adam and Eve is what now scientists nicknamed them just for shits and giggles. 

These first humans, these lovers (if you can call it love), they made a new life. They created and made more humans. Yes they moved around and spread over the thousands of years before the modern age until those humans who gathered in different areas created their own societies, towns and social groups. These are what we call  _ The First Societies.  _

It’s a wild concept really. These Societies created their worlds and their laws and even their own abilities. No one really knows how it was possible but magic was involved. Magic exposed the world that lived inside and around them. Creations and species and humans mixed with everyone and everything. Magic, has always come with a price. 

***

September 5th, 1985. It was a strange world now. The wars were fought and won, monsters have fought for their rights and live amongst humans with almost no issue. Obviously, there are people jumpy around vampires and werewolves and witches and other such creatures. Obviously many years of making peace humans can’t put their guard down; and because of that, monsters can’t either. 

  
  


Third period was gym class for such little witch. A witch that is not fully one but it makes up much of her DNA anyways to call herself a witch. Despite the many stereotypes about witches, she isn’t sickly pale with a large nose and a pointy hat who wears all black. This is a witch with a thick bundle of hair and long legs with bright colored sweaters. A witch that can’t remember the spells for shit and is—

“How the fuck are you failing chemistry?” he asks as he lays on the grass under the tree. They were with the vampires, hiding from the sun while the werewolves were trying to outdo each other on the mile. “You’re a witch!” 

Alana sighs as he rubs her eyes. “It’s different!  _ Three ounces of newts blood  _ is not the same as finding out the mole of whatever equations they give me. And I can’t even cheat! The papers are magic proof— fucking school.” After years of monster kids cheating on tests and papers, the school had invested money on sheets of papers that are magic-proof to stop monsters, such as Alana, to not cheat. 

Oscar pulls on his hoodie string, hot under the black hoodie he had to wear. Being Medusa’s son means no first dates with your hood down and his ID marks  _ Level 5 Monster  _ to show that he’s fucking allowed to go to the movies with his hood up. “Well yeah. You can… you know… study.”

She shakes her head. “No. I’m not. When in my witchy life am I going to use my chem class? I refuse.”

“You’re just making it harder for yourself,” Oscar sighs. 

“Boo-hoo, snake,” she taunts and shivers when she feels something cold go through her. She looks down and sees a white whisky wind, transparent and pearly, go through her and Alana groans when she realized it was a ghost kid. “I didn’t call for you, Casper,” she shivers and the ghost turns around to flick her off before floating amongst the trees and wind. 

The bell rung, meaning it was time for lunch. Alana gets up from the grass, Oscar following as they walk. Normally she would have teleported them back inside the building but she can’t even remember the spell for such things and she’s not willing to risk it, last time she dropped a mermaid-human hybrid into the school pool and it took her three hours to dry. That was the end of that relationship. 

  
  


Lunch starts and kids (monster and humans alike) don’t bother even getting in line. No one is wasting time on the school lunch. And besides, some kids are on special diets anyways. Vampires drink cattle’s blood as if it were a smoothie and werewolves, who tend to be athletes, chomp down on carbs and meats. The mermaids chew on seaweed and kale while the witches just… eat a sandwich or something. 

“That is disgusting,” Kira groans at the sight of pouring a red concoction that has who-knows-what mixed with something that is probably gross to the human in her. 

Alana was pouring it onto her salad. “What? It’s actually good. I like it better than ranch,” she says as she stabs it with her fork and plops lettuce and chicken into her mouth. 

“What even is that?” Kira asks. Normally she isn’t disgusted by anything but whatever the witch brings makes her sick to her stomach. One time she brought something black and lumpy and when she asked what it was the witch’s answer was simply  _ Cow lung.  _ Being half-dragon can be gross when you realize that she eats a bunch of slimy fish. 

“A salad,” she answers in a mouthful. “But the sauce? You’ll throw up if I tell you.” 

Kira gags. “Never mind.”

Someone sits with the two creature girls with a groan. “I got yelled at by a human substitute,” Oscar groans. He doesn’t eat lunch, normally eating a bag of chips from the vending machine; there's really not a lot of things you can eat when you’re a snake. Maybe some mice but cooked mice taste bad when it’s cold so he rather starve. “And I forgot my ID. A fucking fae had to defend my hoodie for Gods’ sake.”

“We’re they cute?” Kira asks. 

He raises his eyebrows. “The fae or sub?”

“Yes,” she said. 

Alana chews her food quietly, looking at the large brick that she calls a phone. Despite this being 1985, magic had advanced technology as a whole. The first computer was created in 1897 if her memory serves correctly and slowly technically began to grow better and better. Magic has always been the source of so many things. 

The witch winces when she bites her tongue. “Ah Fuck!” she says as she covers her mouth. “Fucking shit, I bit myself.”

“Don’t say that,” Kira says as she looks at the vampires three tables away. “They’ll swarm in to get a lick.” 

They all gasp when a said vampire girl appears besides Alana, who still had her hand over her mouth. The vampire girl was someone that Oscar had in his Algebra class, her name was Brianna or something like that, and her gigantic glasses showed off her wide yellow eyes. “Hi! Remember that the Blood Drive is coming up. And that we would appreciate if you donate to my people and the unfortunate. Thank you!” She winks before vanishing again.

A dragon, a Medusa and a witch stare at each other. “Oof. And they call zombies the creepiest monsters,” Oscar says as he looks at the group of said vampires smelling the air. 

Alana removes her hand from her mouth and sees a bit of blood. “Damn it. I hate it when my teeth come in like this.” Those said ‘teeth’ are the same fangs that vampires and werewolves have, just a bit sharper and not as long. This witch isn’t pure blood witch, someone along the long history of the Morales family was a demon and she had the great misfortune to have those sharp teeth once every month like a fucking bloody surprise that she didn’t enjoy one bit. 

She shows them off to her friend. “How do they look?” she asks. 

“You have that red sauce or blood on them,” Kira says as she groans in disgust. Jeez, since when do dragons hate blood? 

  
  



	12. Day 12– Folktale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cousins are bitching

Like many rich people do, they have  _ Get Out Of Jail  _ card in their wallets because of course they fucking have it. Vincent got out in 40 hours thanks to Norris and she made the police report disappear. “Fucking bitch,” Scout had muttered when she heard the news of what she did. 

With Shane still in the hospital (they got a phone call saying that he was dehydrated and overheated, he’ll be out tomorrow) they all stayed in the Goldsworth Manor with Aunt Francesca, who thought it would be funny to  _ handcuff  _ her own kid to the arm of the chair.  _ Psycho,  _ they can all read on Vincent’s eyes when she pulls away. 

“I’ll be back with lunch,” Norris says as she pulls on her expensive coat. “Call me if something happens.” The Devil turns to look at the three cousins. “Just call  _ me.  _ Okay?” The ‘okay’ at the end was added as a way to hide the fact that this was a threat. 

They gulp and nod as she beams a bright smile that would fool anyone if they didn’t know how weird this woman is. “Good. I’ll be back.” Norris walks away and they all hear her footsteps click farther and farther away. Then they heard the door click with a lock. 

All of them let out a sigh of relief, Sophia sinking into the couch and Josh being the wall between her and the guy on the chair. He could tell that Vincent had a bone to pick with her, a hatred that boiled in his eyes and could leak out like angry tears. Scout seemed to be the least scared of this weird, new cousin— rather annoyed but curious about where he was if not grow up with them. 

“So  _ that’s  _ your mom?” she asks, poking the bruise on her knee through the rips on her jeans. “I can see the resemblance,” Scout drawls. 

Vincent scoffs. “You have no idea what it was to live with her.”

Now Scout was the one with anger in her eyes, scoffing louder and sitting up to challenge. “Fucking try me.”

“That’s enough,” Sophia sighs, rubbing her eyes in exhaustion. She didn’t get a blink of sleep with the knowledge of having a cousin in prison, no matter how much he deserved it. He did break into the house. “Can we please get along?” she pleads. 

They all see the new cousin smile, a taunting but also almost nostalgic, suddenly remembered an event earlier in his life. “You haven’t changed a bit have you, Sophie?”

Never in the many, many years of knowing their dear cousin have they seen Sophia turn to look at someone with wide eyes, shocked and offended by being called such nickname. Never has she let someone crawl under her skin like right now. “Don’t… you know how I feel being called that.”

“Of course I know,” Vincent scoffs, getting comfortable with the knowledge that he won. “That’s why I said it.” 

The pink doll didn’t answer, eyes suddenly hard with being hurt in a sense. A low blow in the stomach with that nickname. Josh glances over at Sophia and then at their new cousin. “So… where have you been? A private school in Paris? Rome?” 

Vincent handed him a rare smile. “Sunnyvale actually.” 

The three of them couldn’t believe that this. “You… we’ve been living in the same state for the past six years?” Josh asks. “And we didn’t find out about you until two days ago?!” 

The new cousin shrugs and the chain on the handcuffs chimes against the metal of the arm of the chair. “Mommy dearest didn’t love me enough to mix with you guys.”

“So who did you live with then?” asks Sophia, still on edge about the nickname. “I doubt you lived alone.”

A shake of the head. “No. I had someone, a nanny if you can call her that. I did call her ‘mama’ for a while though until I realized she wasn’t my mom. Caroline,” Vincent recalls, looking at his shoes. “Caroline was my guardian for some years until finally my actual birth mother decided to come and visit me when I turned ten. She told me right off the bat that she was my mom and dropped me off hundreds of miles away with a full-time nanny and would visit me every holiday and birthday and send money to my account to make up for ‘hey I’m sorry I’m not here for most of your life’.”

“So she was basically was sending over child support?” Scout asks, half joking but she knows that that’s exactly what it is. 

Vincent nods. “And hear this: she put me on her will too. Fucking wild.”

“She put you on your will?” Sophia quizzes, “Why would she do that?”

“To make it up to me, I guess,” he says. “When she dies all her money goes to me.” 

There was a long overbearing silence that choke them all, sharp hands around their necks. They never met before, until only two days ago and now here they are: talking about the trauma that one of them had and sharing it like it was a slice of cake each. 

Scout rubs her cheek, a scratch on her face and she looked at Josh, seeing how the bruise on his face had flowered into purple and blue shiner under his left eye. She would hate to admit it that she and Vincent are one in the same; opposite sides of the same coin. Scout had to deal with Francesca while he had to deal with her being away— they wanted each other’s situation. 

“Why did you say that Uncle Ricky haven’t thrown Sophia away?” Josh asks, hissing as he touches the side of his face. 

Again the new cousin scoffs. What’s with him scoffing? Is this a fucking joke to him? “Rich people tend to throw away their kids. Can you blame them? We’re accessories. A play thing. A doll. It’s sooner or later that they’ll give up on raising you—“

“You’re a bitter boy, Vincent,” Sophia says as she stands up, the tips of her ears turning pink with holding back annoyance. Her voice was suddenly serious, not high and dreamy like it usually is. “You always have been. Maybe you should get you head out of… of those thoughts. It’ll do you good.”

Vincent smiles at the sight of her being annoyed. “Oh be a good pet and sit down, Sophie.” He simply waves his wrist to discard her presence. 

“Hey watch your tone with her,” Scout warns as she stands up too, taking a step forward to finally tower him. He was taller than Josh, tall enough to make her sink back just a bit but not to back down. 

The new cousin smiles at her, clearly not threatened. “I always wondered if you switched spots. You’re identical really. And what type of name is Scout? Who was lazy enough to name you that?” 

Josh was the one that had to stop Scout’s arm from throwing a punch at him. He pulls her away as she struggles to get back in front of him. “You’re so fucking annoying, you know that?” she says wiggling and finally sat down on the chair across from the new cousin, only the coffee table being the reason she hasn’t pounce at him. 

“I’m serious,” he smiles, quirked up I’m stuck-up-ness. “What’s your real name? Wouldn’t it be funny if your name is similar to Sophie’s here—“

“Don’t call me that,” Sophia says. 

She gets ignored as Vincent continues. “That would be a cruel joke in the universe’s part. Let me guess… uh, Sonya? Sara? No— maybe something elegant, that would be a big shocker coming from someone like you. Is it… Maria? Maribelle?” He watched her face turn red with anger and it takes so much self control to hold herself back. “Come on, give me a hint. Be a good sport here.”

“Fuck you,” Josh says what Scout was thinking. “You’re a douchebag.” 

“You weren’t saying that when I punched you stupid.” If he wasn’t handcuffed down then he would have stood up to intimidate Josh. “Maybe I knocked some actual brain cells into your skull—“ Vincent was cut off with a slap across the face by the least likely person you can imagine. 

Sophia’s hand was still in the same position after the slap she gave him. Eyes so hard and dark and just so… angry. Everyone was stunned, even Sophia herself. Everyone but Vincent, who reaches up to touch his mouth with his free hand and pulls away his fingers to see a bit of blood. The doll should have been embarrassed, ashamed— she wasn’t. He smiles before saying: “You hit like a girl.”

“You know what…” Scout says as she stands up and steps on the table to cross to him and pushes her cousin out of the way. “I can handle going to jail. You couldn’t. Your mommy had to drag you out, right? How about your other mommy? Does she know that her  _ precious baby boy  _ went to jail?”

“ _ Thats  _ a low blow, Scout,” Vincent admits as he looks up at her and finally he seems hurt by something. “What did I expect by someone so short and so lower class.” 

Fire roads in her as she raises her fist. “Oh, I’ll show you how a girl punches, you dirtbag.” Her fist didn’t even make it to his face before his hand stops her and pushes her into Josh as if she weight nothing more than a piece of paper. 

“You’re such a child,” he draws and ignored them, looking behind him to the door. “You have any idea where Mother went?”

“Mommy’s boy,” Scout shuns him as she stands up and pats herself down. “Why are you even here? Just to scare us shitless?”

Vincent turns to look at them,  _ all _ of them. He finally admits that these people are related to him in some way. Not by blood but by relations— his mother is best friends with Sophia’s father; and Sophia’s father is cousin to Scout’s adoptive father; and Ricky has business with Banjo, Joshua’s boss/father figure. The whole gang's here. 

“You’re Japanese, aren’t you?” He asks Scout and Sophia, who both nodded with an uncertainty of where this is going. “But you don’t speak it?”

Both of the girls shake their heads. “Just French and Spanish,” they mumbled at the same time. 

“Go figures,” Vincent mumbles as he waves his free hand in disregarding the looks on the girl’s faces. “There’s this folktale. It’s about betrayal.  _ Yotsuya Kaidan.  _ Do you know it?”

Sophia was the only one to nod. “My father read it to me when I was little— pictures and all.”

The new cousin makes a hand gesture that tells her to tell the story. Face pink with embarrassment and annoyance, she hesitated but did so; years of being told what to do Woolf make anyone squirm. “In Act 1, we are introduced to a samurai by the name of Tamiya Iemon. He’s disputing with his father-in-law about his daughter Oiwa. The father insists that the samurai and his daughter should separate. Iemon kills him in a moment of rage. Many things happen between the first and second act that include brothels, accidental murders and blackmail.” Sophia takes a breath and looks away, ignoring the small part that has forced into her brain about searching for acceptance. 

“Should be a Disney film,” Scout grumbles. 

“The play ends with Iemon being haunted by the ghost of his wife, who he had murdered earlier on. He runs away into the mountain where he slowly sinks into madness, with his dreams and reality fades together while the ghost began to intensify her haunting. The play ends with another ghost kills Iemon out of vengeance and mercy.”

There was a long silence that came after her telling the story, the whole concept of it made every suddenly very depressed, even Vincent and Sophia who knew what the story was and how it ended. “What was the point of telling us this?” Josh asks, the bruise getting worse and should put ice on it. 

Vincent clears his throat. “The moral of it was that a single fuck up can bring a whole community down.  _ We’re the community.  _ If one of us, any of us, fuck up then the whole family will have the sword of despair fall on them.”

Another silence before Scout snorts. “Jesus fucking Christ, you should write a book.  _ How To Be Pessimist For Dummies. _ You’re so… sad. And in an actual sad way and not in a sad-funny way.”

That got a hum of irritation from him. “All I’m saying is that it’s not only us but them. The grown ups. You know how Benjamin is, we’ll end up like that if we don’t wake up.”

The mention of that name made Josh glare at him. “Shut up,” he says, finally letting this weird cousin under his skin. He does it with such ease that it was plain creepy, if he could do this imagine what else he could do. 

“What are you suggesting anyways?” Scout says, arms crossed and really wanting the Devil to come back. She remembers thinking the opposite, being forced to put on a show for her. To dance, to entertain or to simply just assist. It sucked the happiness out of her. And now, her actual kid was sucking the happiness from their souls like a vampire who gets off to other’s misery.  _ I suppose even the Devil is human,  _ she thinks. “That we rebel and become an anarchy? I’m sorry to tell you but you clearly have never seen many movies and this is fucking insane--”

“How long have you lived with my mother?” Vincent cuts her off completely, she falls silent at the mention of the Devil. God, even the Antichrist is as bad as her, made her own flesh and blood to cause on another generation of suffering. “Two years? Three?” he asks it in such a way that you simply must answer him. He has everything that his mother has: charm and wit, dominance and assertiveness in the situation. She could make you cut your own eye out while her son makes sure you slit your own veins with you teeth. 

Sophia stared at him with a feeling of horror filling her blood stream, it filled her up so quickly that she had to look away but she was too terrified, frozen into place. Is this how her father acted? Has she been so blind to his abuse or is Vincent clearly just insane? Dread makes her swallow a stone in her throat, sour and disgusting.  _ They were alike,  _ she thinks.  _ We’re alike.  _ Rich and in the lap of luxury and the promise of wealth and fame after the death of their blood, they both had people take care of them and almost no time with their actual flesh. A betrayal in a sense-- if you made me then why not be with me?   
  


“That’s none of your--” 

“Tell me,” he demands. 

Scout has always prided herself into not being easy to bend or snap, having her life shattered and broken by an evil woman and she had recovered from it. Until now. With panic rushed into her like when Francesca Norris walked into a room when she was ten years old and was her plaything in such a way. Now, Vincent Norris was messing with her again. A never ending loop. “Too long. I lived with her for simply a year but that was too much for me.” She blurts out, confesses and exhales. 

“A year and she broke you?” 

“Fuck you,” she blurts out quicker than a bullet from a gun. “As if you could do better than me.” 

Vincent then turns to Sophia, who’s heart was beating faster than drumline in a parade. This is evil, cruel. Something from a sick and twisted mind and was trying to trick them into agreeing with him. To hit the most sensitive and soft spots in them and press down on them like a broken bone that he won’t allow to heal. “You’re just like me, you know. I can feel it.”

“That… that’s inappropriate,” she mumbled as a way to keep the wall up between him and her. 

“I mean that-- you’ll hate to admit it but the only reason you’re scared of me is because I’m like you. And that the only reason you pity me is because you’re just like me.”

“Ugh, you’re a pervert,” Josh groans as he stands up. “I’m going to the kitchen. The only pity I have towards you is that your wrist is sore. But I’m not bringing you ice.” 

Before he could even walk away, Vincent stood up but not completely straight due to the handcuffs around his wrist. “Really? Maybe I should give you another black eye.” 

“Sit down, Vince.” A voice came from the doorway. Everyone turned and saw Francesca standing with a brown paper bag in her arms. Vincent visibly flinched at her voice and sat back down in the chair. “I trust that you four behaved.”

They all nod, not wanting to look at her just in case she can reach into their eyes and take their souls. The Devil didn’t have to say a word before they-- all but one -- went into the kitchen and dining room. Vincent was still sitting down and waited until his mother came back, he looked down at his shoes and he swallows when he feels her hand on his wrist, the handcuffed one. “What did you do? Scare them with that silly story of betrayal and adults.” She waits until he nods so she can smile. “Good boy.”

He feels her unlock the handcuff, he rubs his wrist and looks up at her. “Did I do good?” Vincent asks. The Antichrist does have mommy issues. 

The Devil nods. “That’s just the start. Isn’t it?” 


	13. Day 13– Puppet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’m on display for all you fuckers to see

One of Tinsley’s deepest fears is that he’s going to be used. It has happened before, you know. Middle school, a girl just dated him to just copy off of him during the final and she broke up with him in the first week of summer. That was a shitty summer. And then it happened again when a guy he had a (tiny) crush on lead him on to date his best friend at the time. And it also happened again when he was in the police academy and everyone assigned him as the scapegoat when they pulled the end of the year prank. It almost got Tinsley expelled. Thank God for all of the security cameras. 

Even when he was little he has been used, pushed around despite his height and he’s been bullied for his nose and his hair and his teeth and his eyes. He just had rotten luck. It got worse when he started as a cop and later escalated to Vice and then finally detective. His boss didn’t take him seriously when he told her about the strange connections between a series of disappearance of some shade people and parties that were hosted in Goldsworth’s Manor. She thought that he was just burned out and made him take a break.

There’s no rest for the wicked, Tinsley thought to himself as he continued to work from the comfort of his own home. Looking back on how he was living Ricky would have slapped him for not taking care of himself. He would wake up at 5 AM, eat nothing but drink two cups of coffee. Then he would drink two more cups of coffee by noon and accidently swallow his gum by sipper time. He’s only eaten breakfast twice and swallowing the smell of pancakes counted as one to him. Tinsley was a hot mess back then, probably living like college kid with no morals and even less money.

Slowly he began to connect the dots between Goldsworth and the bodies that seem to appear two week at a time every time he hosted a party. Tinsley read also some strange things about said Mister Goldsworth. He has donated so much money that he was close to renouncing his title as a millionaire but somehow continues to make money as if he was charging people by breathing. His companies consisted of many particular things: factories and it seems that he had put some money in the stock market and he had always been at guessing (according to the article about him). To anyone he looks like a normal, just extremely rich and handsome. 

Tinsley remembers his heart skipping a beat when he saw his photo. Ricardo Goldsworth was in a charity event that was not hosted in his own luxurious mansion but he looked like he had the charisma to convince people that he owned the place. It was his eyes that Tinsley couldn’t shake out of his head. He remembered sinking into them like an abyss, and the abyss seemed to caress him back. It reminded him of smoke from a fire, and he saw his face in the smoke and fire in his chest. Those eyes wanted to swallow him and Tinsley was convinced that he would let himself be swept away. 

But he had to continue being professional. Reading about his life and how he was so lucky for making such money. A classical story of rags and riches. It seemed cut and dry but Tinsley wouldn’t shake off the feeling of suspicion about him. The man was drop dead gorgeous, beautiful even. So it was possible that he was sleeping with multiple people and they were paying him to stay quiet about their affair. Both men and women alike would be shunned for sleeping with such a man. It was a theory but it didn’t really lead anywhere when the detective realized that it was just a wild accusation and there was no way that he could do that without any suspicion being raised about him.  _ Maybe he slept with the bankers too.  _ That thought made him shiver and take a cold shower to calm down. 

It wasn’t a secret that Ricky had a daughter. She was featured in almost photo that had him in it. Tinsley thought that maybe she was adopted until he took a really hard look at Sophia’s young face and the detective could see his outline around her face. It took some digging up to find out that Ricky’s first wife died of an overdose when young Sophia was just two years old. It did break Tinsley’s heart. 

Now he has to admit that maybe he was obsessed with the concept of Ricky Goldswirth. Handsome and rich and powerful, could make the mountain move with only a flick of his wrist as if it was just a simple thing. And if Tinsley’s friend could hear him now then they would have teased him to infinity. 

If he really had friends. 

Everything soon escalated when Tinsley being bold and on his last day on his paid leave, he went to the Goldsworth Manor. That same say was when Ricky had been hosting a party for his 25th birthday. When the detective heard such thing it made him feel old so quickly that he has rubbed the side of his face to feel the whiskers that he should have shaved to look even a bit professional. 

Till this day he still didn’t know how he managed to get inside but he does remember the people crowding around and dancing and smiling with champagne breath and glitter on their faces. This is what happens when a 25 year old has a bunch of money and decided to get wasted. Everything around Tinsley made him think of  _ The Great Gatsby _ . He had read the book in high school and when he would read the party scenes he would use up most of his imagination trying to imagine how it would feel to be in such a party. Now he didn’t. This is far more than his high school imagination. This was real. He could touch the gold and smell the wealth. 

But nothing, no gold or drinks or rich could compare it to him meeting the host. He had bumped into him and when Tinsley had turned around to apologize it took him a solid minute to snap out of his starstruck daze. apologizes that wanted to come out of his mouth were only half completed and he saw Ricky Goldsworth smile at him.  _ He smiled at me!  _ Tinsley’s brain was having a meltdown. He’s never felt this way before. He felt raw and exposed.

He didn’t know what happened next but all he knows that Ricky Goldsworth had laughed--  _ laughed _ at something he had said and told him to come back tomorrow for a private dinner. Tinsley thought it was a miracle he hadn’t fainted on the spot. 

Now he’s been living with Ricky for the past five years but have known each other for longer now. Tinsley was living comfortably. Living in silk shirts and expensive colognes and fancy restaurants. He’s basically his sugar baby (Shane had joked about that before and it made Tinsley want the ground beneath him swallow him up). But he was happy, his eyes were brighter and he slept comfortably in a Californian Sized bed with the man he loves so much. A strange but beautiful man. 

Tinsley had made his family promise to not say a word about him still being alive. Faking your death to live with a criminal billionaire? Yeah, the detective was sure that was illegal. He has a family now. A real family he can call his own. He isn’t a prisoner as many of the maids have whispered when he started to be there for longer days. And he wasn’t a “fling” as the butler had pulled him aside and whispered to watch his back about. And he wasn’t a glorified nanny as he feared; yes, Ricky did trust him with his actual blood child but he didn’t leave him with her and then vanish. He was there for his daughter but there for his work-- and was there with him.

Finally, he found a home. 

***

With Ricky being all businessman-like, you’ll expect him to be cold and distant. But he isn’t. He was surprisingly sweet and nice to everyone he actually loves and who don’t work for him. When it was late at night, Ricky would sneak his hand into Tinsley’s when he was reading, or put his head on his shoulder and slowly doze off. It was domestic enough to make any newly couple smile. 

Ricky was also the type of man who would not mix his work with his personal life, not unless when it was absolutely necessary. He and Ricky haven’t been public news, not wanting to attract attention when you’re supposed to be dead is common sense. Tinsley cut himself from many parties and stays as far away from him until Ricky tells him he’s safe. 

He loves the man so much that the veil of adoration and infatuation blinds him in a way that would seem unhealthy to those who don’t know that there is good and pure ness in their relation. 

_ If so it seems.  _

Some days, when Tinsley was alone— Ricky in his office and Sophia playing the piano in her bedroom —he feels alone. Extremely alone. He reads and spends time in the library and in the art gallery and sometimes has the urge to actually watch television. But he’s still alone. 

He fears that he’s being clingy and will bring coffee to Ricky when he just needs a… a hit of his smile or his eyes or even just to look at him. Jesus Christ, he sounds like a junkie. These occasions are the ones that make him so disgusted and angry by himself and he gets the urge to pull his own hair out because he’s acting like the stalker-lunatic of his cousin. 

In the rare occasions where he can’t stand himself and simply has to look at Ricky working, he walks in and just stares at him in the doorway for a few seconds while he’s on the phone with someone not as rich and important as he is. Tinsley would walk and sit down on one of the two seats in front of his desk. And when he was going to sit down, Ricky would look up and give him a  _ look.  _ And then simply waves his hand to  _ shoo  _ him away. 

Tinsley freezes as cold runs through his veins and blood, feeling as if ice water was dunked on him. Shaking, shivering— he takes in a deep breath and walks back to the door, not turning his back to the tiger. 

Never has he called him a tiger like others do behind his back. Not until those rare moments. 

Dread fills him as he runs up the stairs, tripping slightly before falling into their bedroom— the room he and Ricky share —and falling into the bed. He breathes in and out, shallow and hard like he can’t get the air through his nose or mouth. 

This is where an emptiness fills him to his brim, swallowing his core like a kid swallowing candy, binge eating and gluttony as if it was the best thing in the world. God, he’s so sick. Empty. Hollow. As if he was a doll and all of the stuffing was pulled out in a disgusting way, with hollow eyes and long nails with strong fingers.  _ Just like Ricky.  _

Tinsley wonders, he thinks for the first time in years with how own thoughts and ideals: he’s being used. 

He’s simply a toy or a puppet. Pulling in the strings like a puppet master. And Tinsley’s first fear was:  _ what if Ricky decides to cut those strings? _


	14. Day 14– Poison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He saw him first

It’s known that he’s the crazy cousin. It’s been known since Banjo could recall. He isn’t crazy or off his rockers or anything like that. He genuinely doesn’t believe it. Well, maybe the crazy doesn’t even know that they’re crazy? Maybe there is a point where the crazy admit their insanity and continue to do so— maybe that’s where the fucked up part of the brain understands. 

Banjo isn’t insane, he tells himself that. He’s just obsessive and impulsive and just… greedy. Yes, he’s willing to admit all of the negative things about him. He’s greedy and prideful and jealous. The ego that pulses inside of him is like a sickness or a tapeworm, consuming everything he swallows and it affected him. God, was he angry. 

He’s not just angry; he’s living with anger. It’s in his brain like a ghost in a haunted home, a parasite that demands so much of him, the anger is swallowing him whole. 

Despite that, despite everything he’s living with, he’s still there. Banjo has a kid now, not technically his like Sophia to Ricky or Scout to Shane and Ryan. He has Josh. They’re living together in a not-so-small apartment, Banjo paying the bills while Josh works with him after school and during weekends and the summertime. The art thief is just… his guardian. He signs so many syllabuses when it’s the first week of school, field trip sheets and the report card every two times a year. Josh had made up a nifty little lie about Ben being his uncle despite looking  _ nothing  _ alike. Most uncles don’t even look like their nephews or nieces anyways. 

Banjo is still there almost every Thanksgiving or Christmas but never Easter because— who the Fuck celebrates Easter like that? He isn’t there but Josh is. When work comes up he leaves him there at Ricky’s house; and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t get a look at him for just a second. 

He is obsessive. Every once in a while he’ll get a hyper fixation on some random things: knitting, embroidery, baking and painting. Just random harmless things that come and go like the common cold. But this obsession, the one that has stuck around for so long that it’s part of who he is. A leech that sucks the other parts of him away. This obsession is one that would drive you insane, the fixation on a serial killer had made many detectives and cops go insane. Yet—  _ Ricky Goldsworth is no simple obsession.  _

And he’s no mere serial killer. He’s a metaphor, a hyperbole. He’s the symbol of starting from the bottom and rising to the top but becoming the monster that spit on his face when he first started. Banjo knows how Ricky came around to be who he is, because he was there. 

He saw him rise and smile. He saw him being a college dropout to one of the wealthiest men on the face of the earth. Banjo was there first. 

The art thief was on a trip when he heard that his cousin was in the hospital and had turned around mid-trip to go and visit him. Fuck, Nevada; he never liked it as much as people think he does. Banjo called Legs, who was there too, and asked for the hospital. 

Bringing a basket of muffins for his family to munch on. Legs has always been a stress eater anyways. He knocks on the door after zigzagging through neon white hallways and nearly being blinded by white lab coats brighter than the sun, it was Nick who opened the door. 

Banjo has always liked Nick, not because he’s Ricky’s brother but because he’s a simple man with simple pleasures that involves glasses of wine and piano music. “Hey. How’s he doing?” he whispers. He feels like he should whisper. 

“He’s fine,” Night also whispered. Or maybe he spoke normally. Shorter people tend to sound small to him. “He’s just asleep.”

Ryan was sitting next to him, seeming tired and sore with bags under his eyes. There was a respect here that Banjo knows people will make fun of him for feeling like this but it’s true. He’s never seen a person care for another without expecting much in return yet the opposite person does the same back. The art thief swore that they were married in another life. 

“I brought this,” Banjo says as he lifts up the basket a bit to show Ryan, who smiles a thank you. He seems too tired to talk. Stress tends to drain you. 

Shane was laying on bed, an IV in his arm and connecting up to a bag of water above Ryan’s head. If Banjo thought that Ryan looked bad, his dear cousin looked the worst. Paler than usual, thinner and looking as if he actually passed away. 

Banjo swallows before patting his shoulder and looking at everyone in the room with them. There was Nick and Legs, and then there was the person where he hopefully wished wasn’t there yet desperately wanted. Ricky was leaning against the wall, the top three buttons undone and not wearing a suit jacket. He looked like he has every single sin tucked inside his pockets. 

Trying his best to ignore the dark eyes that were the abyss that post people talk about in literature, he shakes hands with everyone before the only person left that he has not yet shook his hand was the tiger. A long time ago, before Tinsley and before his sweet little daughter could even talk, back when Ricky was a young father who slowly was rising to the top-- they had made an agreement. They had talked over dinner about the agreement, something secretive and even a bit ritualistic as they chewed on the fine dining that the chefs had served them both. It was about their “relationship”. It was Ricky’s words and not his. But when the art thief have heard those words out of the tiger’s mouth he would have fainted if he wasn’t sitting down. They spoke, they talked for what felt like hours and it was the best goddamn hours of his life. And finally, they agreed.

Rules, like Ricky liked to call such behaviors. Rules for when the see each other, rules when they talk and people are around. It was just a bizarre set of rules that should have made anyone is this type of relationship worry and raise an eyebrow. But Banjo here just so happy with the delicious opportunities to see him and touch him. 

_ Don’t touch unless it’s absolutely necessary.  _

Banjo’s hand twitches when he realized that he has to touch him. He has to shake his hand to keep up appearances. It’s not like they’re having an affair or anything, but the art thief wishes that it was true. He prays that they are and that they meet in secret like those old movies. He prays after a sick and lonely night in the bedroom with the hope that the tiger would walk through his bedroom door and just be… with him. To love him and only him. To fuck over his daughter and Tinsley to be with him. To run away together in some wonderland they can call their own. He wishes that. 

When they finally touch hands, he feels everything inside of him jolt like a lightning strike that would swallow him whole and buzz with excitement. Their handshake was brief moment, almost as if they were disgusted by one another and simply did it for niceties. 

But he was shaking. Trembling. The type that comes when you’ve been a good child for so long until finally you get experience the thrills of being a bad kid. He doesn’t know why he’s excited, maybe because he touched him. 

To touch Ricky Goldsworth is to have God on your fingertips. To feel the sky. To feel the finest piece of art with no shame. 

Banjo sits down as he sees Legs reach into the basket of muffins to munch on one that looked like it was blueberry. He remembers the last time he was in a hospital, when Josh broke his arm and needed a cast. The art thief remembers that Josh was crying not because of the pain but because he didn’t want Banjo to spend money on him, embarrassed that someone would pay so much for him. That’s where Banjo pities this boy so much. 

Ryan sniffles as he rubs his face. “Thanks. I didn’t think that you’ll come.”

“Shane’s family,” Night says with his hands in his pockets. “He’s as much as family as you are to us.”

Banjo watches Ryan smile from the corner of his eyes. Only the corners, watching Ricky like he was the best thing besides slice bread. A small smile on his lips as he takes in his radiance, as if he were the sun and Banjo has not felt it after years of wintertime. 

But to love Ricky means that you must live with other things as well. The days that drag on without his touch; the feeling like you’ll never get enough; the greedy and jealous that make you want to stay by his side like his guard dog. Banjo lives with these things. But there’s another thing— to love Ricardo Goldsworth is to accept the consequences behind it. 

To love him is to accept the poison, the toxins and the sins that come to do with such things like the tiger. 

In the dark, fucked-up part of his mind where he knows that he’s in a hospital with his cousin (not dead or dying but still here nonetheless) but he’s just so… god he wants to pull Ricky away and kissing him silly in his car until the windows fogged up like a secret that everyone can see. Because this is what it is. A secret that the whole world could see because it’s plain and simple. 

Banjo can accept that he’s fucked up. The question was, was he always fucked in the head or was it the tiger poisoning him? Infesting his brain like a disease that no one can explain. 

“When does he get out?” Finally he speaks. One the tall skinny white guys speaks. 

Ryan sniffles again. “Tomorrow. He’s just sleeping. I’m surprised he’s not awake.”

They all stood in silence before Banjo walks up to Shane, crossing in front of Ricky with the hope to feel his aura against him just a bit. He takes in a deep breath to calm himself. The art thief’s eyes lock with Tinsley, who was the only person sitting besides Ryan. He watched him and he watched him back. Sharp eyes and curious stares and with the idea to not speak a word about the mental conversation they have. 

This is where Banjo is jealous. He will. He will always get as he feels it when he falls asleep and his was shaking with anger and sadness as he drinks. He feels it— the best way he could describe it— is drawing circles on a notebook with a pen and slowly pressing harder and  _ harder and harder and faster until it just—  _

This is why he’s jealous. This is why. Because Tinsley doesn’t deserve Ricky. He doesn’t deserve a God, a Tiger, The Man. He’s a mere simple man, never going to understand that the person he sleeps with is better than him in every way. 

He’s jealous because  _ Banjo saw him first. _


	15. Day 15– Autopsy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death is not as clear

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: possible rape, violence against women, gore (ish?)

She’s been dead for a while. She’s been dead for so long that many people forgot that she existed. They forgot the body inside the bag— in the morgue. They forgot that she died a week ago and she’s been waiting there, frozen like a fish stick that no one wants. She’s been dead for so long that her family doesn’t even know that she’s been missing. 

Her family assume that she’s still on her trip. And besides, she’s always been that one family member that gets forgotten. She’s never in pictures because she’s the one that’s in the bathroom and no one told her that they’re going to take a family picture. Being simple and not a mess makes you forgettable. 

When her body was finally pulled out of the bag and placed on the table, the men touched her the same way she was touched before being killed. She remembers, right before the light at the end of the tunnel came closer and closer, the way they touched as if she was a bag in a simple hotel. As if she was simply a body before actually becoming a body. 

The men, two of them with one being much younger than the other. Father and son, perhaps? The father’s face was old, the type you see in cartoons to symbolize wisdom and age, with his hair and mustache being as white as snow. 

_ Snow _ . She’ll never get to see snow now. 

The son was three times younger than his father, his face was round with warm meals and love on the table. She could see his father in the son’s eyes. What a marvelous thing was it to have someone who looks like them. The pride of making a human life and bringing it into the world with half of your being and the other half of the person you love the most. What a beautiful thing to know that is it part of you but you’re okay because it’s your  _ child.  _

What a beautiful pride. 

What a beautiful death to die surrounded by the person you molded into a good person. A good soul. A well rounded person. Whatever you may call it but the death to have them right there and you see them glitch away as you begin to fade away.  _ A death.  _

It must be nice to die in such a peaceful way. The last thing she remembers before fading into the darkness was fury and strength and the smell— a smell that will make her gag in her grave.  _ Will she have a grave?  _ The smell of skin against skin, skin that was disgusting and would never mix without pleasure. To die without pleasure it to remember a life without soul. 

Nails pulling in skin, large hands in her hair. A scream that vibrates in her own throat. A feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. She dies without a bang, because that would be too easy. Too quick. Too simple. Death, sometimes, isn’t as simple as it seems. 

“Punctured lung it seems,” the son speaks as his gloved fingers reach to touch the space between her ribs.  _ So that’s the hot feeling in me?  _ “A sloppy hit though. It seems like it took some more blows though.”

“Maybe,” the father hums as he reaches for the plate of knives exposed out for him besides him. He picks one up, sharp and round as he spreads the three bloody marks on her chest. “They’re round. So maybe a screwdriver?”

_ Screaming and yelling as she pulls away, hand wrapping around her waist as something sharp pushes inside of her, fast and sore and just hard enough to pop something. And it did.  _

The next following events go on and on like some steady motions. Tabloides and pictures that belong in a movie. She sees herself as if she was the camera in a film, the father and son covering her open body as they pull out her organs. She sees everything and feels— no  _ wants  _ to feel what they do to her. She wants and hopes that she’ll feel pulling of her intensities and the snapping of her rib cage. To hope that there may be some life in that body of hers. 

“It does seem cut and dry, no, Papa?” The son asks as he watches his father take off his white latex gloves and plops them in the trash can. 

The father reaches for his clipboard and pen that was set on the small table that also held up the knives. “Perhaps,” he grumbles. 

“You always say that? When is a death— a body enough to tell the story?” The son asks, sick and tired of the vague answers that he always seems to get. She understands that. Never has she gotten the attention she needed as a child from anyone. Not mom or dad. Maybe her dear sister. Her dear sister who is not likely to cry at her funeral. The sister that there’s something about her— 

“No single body is enough to tell the whole story,” the father grumbles wisely. “Seeing a body is simply reading a page of a book. The rest of the book and the story is up to everyone else. Everyone knows their own pages but we all have the story.”

Her death was simple. Simple and plain. But she didn’t understand why she was here. Why she wasn’t in Heaven or Hell? Maybe this is Purgatory that the Catholics talked about so much? Was this the punishment that she needs to go through to purify her own sins?

“What was her name again?” The son says, trying to walk around the explanation that frankly make any sense to him. 

The father sighs, understanding his son’s misunderstanding. “Her name? Uh—“ he looks at his clipboard and reads the name on the top that was written in blue ink. “Freddy. Freddy Harkwell.”


	16. Day 16– Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps the worst one

“How did you sleep?” 

It was early in the morning. 7:30 according to the clock on the wall that was probably broken and said the time right only twice a day yet both of them were too lazy or busy to understand. And it’s not like they’re that well off to ask some from downstairs to fix them for them when Legs can literally reach you and put it in. 

The bitter smell of coffee walks through the apartment, making itself home like the years they had made themselves at home in his place. 

Nick groans as he rubs his eyes, pouring a little bit too much milk into his mug. He curses as he catches himself and wipes the table with a rag. “Take fucking guess,” he grumbles. 

The tall man that was sitting on the stool next to him smiles at his own mug of coffee. “I figured,” Legs said. “You we’re moving around like crazy in bed. And not in the way I enjoy.” The giggle that came out of him mouth was received by a light punch on the arm by his roommate. 

“I need to get some sleeping pills,” Night said. “You could go with me or not. I rather not leave  _ you  _ alone in the apartment.” To call this their apartment is an understatement. It was more similar to a penthouse or a Congo. But they would rather not live in their own home.

“I’ll go with you.” Of course he said that. They’re both attached by the hip, never seen away too long from each other like a new couple too excited to show off their partners. When Night and Legs started living together and having their relationship as simple as you can imagine, with no feeling attached mind you, those feelings began to grow. Night now knows what his brother sees in that giant of a man Tinsley. And it seems like the brothers have a type. 

“Okay,” he says before sipping his coffee. “What do you want for dinner?” He asks when they haven’t even eaten breakfast. He asks that because it’s his turn to cook tonight. 

“Surprise me.” 

Night scowled at him. “Shut up. If you don’t answer me I’ll go back to bed to take a nap.” The threat was more of informing that he’ll take a nap when he’s done with his coffee. 

“Fine,” Legs groans as he finishes the last of his coffee. “Stake? Go all American dinner.”

He smiles as he watched Legs stand up and put the mug in the sink, turning back to the bedroom for the daily morning shower. “Now was that hard to say?” he says. 

The tall man stops at the doorway to look at him over his shoulder. “You’re a douchebag,” Legs says as he fakes his tone of voice to sound like an angry foreigner. A game they play. A game that was behind a weird joke that appeared her they were still no-strings-attaching. 

“I kno’,” mumbles Nick with his own accent before finishing his coffee. He doesn’t even know why he drank it when he’s going back to sleep. Maybe he’s finally old enough to call himself crazy. 

He stands up to walk towards him and his arms are out to wrap around Legs thin waist. Small waisted and long legs and wide shoulders with shoulder blades that Nick swears could cut his tongue when he touches in the late night with their hands together. He looks up. “Just get into the shower,” Nick teases. 

Legs looks down and wraps his hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to,” he says but doesn’t move an inch. “It’s just that a sloth had decided to wrap itself around me.”

Night snorts and puts his face in his chest, feeling the soft feeling of the robe brush against the bridge of his nose and his cheekbone. “I am  _ not  _ a sloth,” mumbles Nick. “You’re the one that looks like a sloth.”

“That’s true,” agrees the tall man as he plays with Night’s hair, hearing him hum and almost purr in delight. “I’m a sloth. You’re a gopher.”

That earned him being let go of but still close enough to feel the warmth that was slipping out through Nick’s shirt. “Shut up,” he mumbled as the tips of his ears turn the lightest shade of pink he allowed himself to show before moving a bit closer to kiss the bottom of the tall man’s neck before slipping by him. 

He crashes into the still warm bed and drowns himself in the covers and blankets. It was Legs weird impulse to buy blankets he thinks will match with the bedroom, and having them all stacked up on the bed alongside all of the throw pillows. A weird man indeed. 

Night was halfway asleep when he hears Legs laughs a bit before patting his lower back. “Sleep tight, gopher.” He then walks away and Night hears the shower turning on when he was already in dreamland. 

Dreamland. A silly concept that would make his teenage self scoff at the childish idea of it. He was the type where he didn’t tolerate or allow himself to dwell this type of foolishness when he had the hairs on the back of his neck standing up straight 24/7. When he had to look over his shoulder on the streets or at him. When Nick didn’t allow himself to sleep fully at night, his eyes slipping open at the sound of the creaking of the wooden floor. He’s never had a good night’s sleep since he’s been five. And maybe that’s where the nickname came from. 

But he dreamt. He dreamt of blue waters and clear skies, the sun looking as if it was all of the gold in the world fused together and pushed up on the sky. Nick was laying down the ground, on the grass of what he assumed was a park or a field. He watched the sky slowly seeming to zoom closer and closer and closer until— 

Until he feels it like a pressure. As if a heavy slab of rock was crushing him against the wiry grass, moving and twisting to touch the stone and to pull down and down and down, crushing against the moist ground until he feels it wetten for a different reason. Dying in a dream is strange because you see yourself  _ die, dead, dying _ but you’re not dead. You’re watching the metaphoric lights fade from your eyes and simply wonder if that’s how you’re going to look like someday. 

Night wakes up, his face pressed against the pillow with an amount of drool that would make his shame spike up. He never knew where he got his shame from. Not his dad for sure, he was never embarrassed of the bruises he left on his mother’s arms or on Ricky’s cheek or Nick’s busted lip. He was never embarrassed to spend the money and drink it all away. He wasn’t embarrassed when he threw up and choked on his own vomit. He was never ashamed to know that both Nick and Ricky were the reason for his death. His father was not ashamed. Not even in his own grave. 

The sound of the water being turned off made the ex-mobster wipe the saliva that had pooled and sit up, covering his chest like those women in the moevies after having sex. He never really understood that about rom-coms. He also doesn’t understand why he did so. Both of them have seen each other naked so much that they literally act like a married couple-- not wanting each other fully sexually but also acting on their desires to want and need each other. Such desires are the reason why they’re together in the first place. Who knows what would they be without each other. 

Legs steps out of the bathroom, steam spilling out alongside the tall silhouette of this giant of a man. He sighs as he walks around the bedroom they shared to look for his side and his drawers and nightstand. “How was your little nap?” Logam asks as he slips on his clothes. 

Nick didn’t answer for a while before getting out of bed. “I think the coffee messed me up. I have the weairdest fucking dreams all the time.”

“I think you just need a self care day,” Legs says as he buttons up his shirt. “You now… take naps and a hot bath, indulge and splurge. So you don't have to worry about work. I can do it myself if you want me to.” 

“I… I just don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says. “We don’t have enough time on our schedule to relax. And I do feel fine. I do. I just need to sleep more and maybe I’m just becoming an imsoniac and shit like that and--” Nick was silenced by long arms wrapping around his cold frame. Miles and miles of warm skin from the shower, the feeling of the nice crisp white shirt that Logan had on tickled him softly like the wind through his hair. It was nice. So nice that Nick found himself sinking and sinking until he could have fallen asleep in Legs’ arms standing up and using him as a stand. It was nice enough that Nick would rather be caught dead than admitting that he loves moments like these. 

All his life he was told to toughen up and when he finds himself sinking into the softness of the world and the softness that he had repressed in himself then he is reminded that he is still that little boy with the split lip and the bags under his eyes; the young man who joined the mob because he wanted a home and realized that home is where the bruises are; and now he’s the man who is still sore and his bones are bruised and asted and now he has the time to heal. The type to fix himself. The time to patch himself up like the teddy bear he had back home. 

He sighs again. “Maybe you’re right,” Nick admits. He confesses like it was the hardest thing in the world to admit. Harder than saying Fuck You to his dad’s grave. “But I’m still going to the doctor’s though. I do think I need those pills.” Nick sighs as the feeling of warm skin as he moves away, letting the warmth that they had made by being close and was being replaced by the cool gust of wind that came from the slightly opened window. 

“Okay,” Legs says with his hands still on his shoulders. “Let’s get changed.” 

*** 

Nick would hate to admit it but he is just like his brother. Not exactly, being twins and all they get often teased for having the similar looks and the similar lives. Criminals who fell in love with a tall skinny man who look like they haven’t slept for a while and are living on three cups of coffee. It shows that the blood line does have a type. 

But the only difference is that Nick won’t say…  _ it  _ to Legs. He has seen and heard Ricky say it to Tinsley, he’s seen him hold his hand or scoot in close to him because he likes him--  _ he more that likes him _ . The L-Word if you may. Nick hasn’t even said it to anyone who isn’t his mom; no past girlfriend have heard say those three little words from his mouth. And most of them were okay with that. Most of them who expected a short but fun time from him and not the type that wanted to stay with him after high school and get married and have a little litter of kids. The idea of such things make him sick to his stomach. 

Marriage? Kids? A white picket fence? That’s disgusting. Nick, despite being the older of the two, he was the one that snuck out of the house during high school and spiked the punch during homecoming and got kicked out of class and things that you expect from a hormonal shitty person of a teenager with daddy issues and a mom who’s always at work. Surprisingly it was Ricky who was the responsible one, he was the one that stayed at home and had no friends and said nothing in class. Polar opposites. And if Night even mentions it to Ricky he would stand him in the ribs. 

And despite that, him being the loner and the one who didn’t have his first kiss until sophomore year of college-- Ricky has Tinsley and Sophia. Perfect family as it seems. 

“Nicholas Bergara?” 

After the doctor’s visit and answering questions about his sleeping schedule and his work and what may be causing these disturbances to his needed 8 hours of sleep, doctor assigned him some pills. Not fully sleeping pills but similar enough that when he takes them he relaxes and is able to sleep without any issue. Not only that but also seemed to have given him the same conversation as Legs did this morning about stress and him needed some personal time. Legs was ecstatic when he heard that he was basically right and hung the fact that a doctor approved what he said to get Nick to take a nap. 

But now they were waiting for such pills, part of Nick wanted to joke that the pills probably had cannabis. He wanted to make the joke but even living in California it still feels weird. For so long Nick had seen his friends sneak a joint in the bathroom for a smoke, half of the high didn’t only come from the drug itself but also the adrenaline of getting caught or getting away with it. Now that it’s legal, it almost had lost its charm and drug dealers are going out of business because hipsters decided that this is a great business opportunity— while Nick’s friends are still waiting in a cell and waiting out the ten years for a gram that was for themselves. It almost makes someone so mad that they don’t want to even sleep. 

After the pills that seemed to rattle every step that he took, Legs reaches to grab his hand to hold as they walked. After all this time together, Night still tenses up when he grabs his hand with the fear that someone will see them. It's the paranoia that he can never swallow or get pass it, having the idea planted into his brain, nailed into his morality and survival code. But when he is confronted with… this— with affection, he instantly doesn’t know how to react. 

“You want to get something for lunch?” Legs asks, unaware of how he had affected him with something as simple as holding hands with him. “I heard that there’s this place where they sell rolled up ice creams, it’s so weird. I saw a video on it.” He talked as if he was old, old enough to not know the name of apps but then again he never really was on his phone unless he was drowning in boredom. 

The casual tone as he holds his hand and walk makes Night look over his shoulder every once in a while just in case. “Uh, yeah sure,” he agrees mindlessly before looking up to see his face. How was he so casual about this? I mean, yes he was tall so maybe that give the radiation of not giving a shit and able to intimidate someone who might give him a second glance. Maybe he was quick to accept himself. Faster than him. 

  
  
  


When they got home, Night puts the bag on the couch as he sighs and touched his face. The lack of sleep from the past few days have finally beginning to sink in. Nick yawns a bit tired enough to admit that. “I think I’m finally able to relax.” He says as he feels Legs sit down next to him and gets close. 

“So you’re finally going to relax?” he asks him. Nick yawns. “Good,” he stands up to pick up Nick. “You’re taking a nice warm bath and then you’ll take those pills so you can sleep. A nice nap, okay?” Legs says and the smaller of the two knows that he won’t say no to him when he knows that he has to put his health in his hands. In this moment, Logan is his doctor. 

The bath was nice, nice enough to make him doze off. If he wasn’t careful he could have drowned in the bathtub for being an idiot. He dried himself off quickly, getting cold easily after feeling the A/C hit his chest and not wanting to get sick alongside being a fucking insomniac (he sounds like his mom Jesus Christ). He gets into comfortable clothing before taking the pill that Logan had left on his table alongside a cup of water, making him feel like he’s in a hospital— which is surprisingly comforting. Nick has always wanted to know what Logan wanted to be if he wasn’t caught up with the mob stuff, he knows that he loves kids so maybe he could have been a pediatrician or something along the lines of being a medical professional. And now that he thinks about it… what would he have been if he wasn’t like this? 

What were his dreams? Would he be an accountant like his mother wanted him to be? Or a gym teacher? Maybe a math teacher, he was always decent at math enough to pass. What would he be? The future isn’t his anymore to see. What would he be? What can he be? 

Nick lays down the bed, a stereotypical Californian bed that was as large as the horizon and as soft of the clouds that dance across the sky. He loves this bed, he remembers him and Logan going out to buy it after them moving in and being slightly tipsy after a few drinks. He loves that bed. He loves this life he had now. He loves everything that has come up to his life until now. He loves this apartment. He loves the stove and hoe bad in can be sometimes. He loves how big the windows are. He loves Legs. He loves— 

Holy shit. 

“Sweet dreams,” Legs’ voice came from the door as he closes it behind him. 

_ Holy shit.  _


	17. Day 17– Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the moon as his witness

The bed he was sleeping in was comfortable, the softest cotton he has felt and the goose feather pillows was a crown around his head. He didn’t realize how simply he and caroline have been living-- not poor but not extremely wealthy. Yes they had food on the table and money in their wallets for any emergency like running out of gas in their not-so-nice car that runs. They were more than surviving.  _ Middle class _ , he remembers the name of it. Maybe a little over middle class. They lived in a normal house in a small and cozy neighborhood, not a gated community like the mansion his mother lives in. 

In the back of his head, Vincent has always wondered what would have happened if he was still living with his mother. Would she lock him up and prevent him from going out like Goldsworth does to Sophia? Would she not care what he does and simply is there to get him out of trouble when needed? Maybe if she had kept him then maybe.. She would have loved him. She would have learned how to love him like the child he is. Francesca would have been there when he fell from a tree, or when he learned how to ride a bike or when he was a baby and said his first word.  _ Mama _ . That was the first word that came out of his little young mouth, fresh from the now real vocal chords. Vincent would have said that to his real mother. 

No disrespect to Caroline, who has done all her work to take care of him, being the mother he needed growing up but Vincent needed to know the real thing. Like a traveler going back to the beginning , their homeland after years walking the world and learning amd lastly going back to the comfort of their skin and blood. Vincent had learned who his mother is, and he understands now why she was gone. 

He sits up from the bed and looks at the large window, the curtains not fully closed with the wind coming from the slightly open window and the curtains dancing around in the air of his room. The night sky and the moon were watching him. They invaded his privacy as they watch him ponder in a strange house that shares his blood. Maybe they could read his mind and were simply enjoying the show that was happening. After all, the Moon has been around for thousands of yeas and there must have been a way that it hasn’t gotten yet and not pull out if it’s orbit around the earth. Perhaps the humans the Moon watches over was entertained for the past thousands of years. Many years and many humans to watch.

When Vincent was a child, Caroline would tell him myths and legends about the world around him, teaching him lessons and then later explaining it to him when he didn’t understand the moral of the story. Normally he understood it all of the time-- well that’s a lie. He knows what the story is trying to say but he doesn’t really  _ understand  _ it. For many years he thought he was a psychopath (a cliche for any orphan child with only one parental figure, he realizes know) and maybe there is a little of it in him. Maybe he isn’t the only one with a little of it in him. 

Vincent sits at the windowsill and open the curtains a bit to show the moon even clearer, large and white like a gigantic eye watching him suffer. Maybe this was the feeling that those character in the stories he was read. Maybe this is the sense of being watched. Maybe he is the moon to them. 

The sound of the bedroom door opening makes him look over his shoulder but looks away when he realized who it was. “Did my mother make you talk to me?” he asks the duo. 

“You’re right,” the clone of an old friend says, her voice was deep annoyance and seemed to be clearly threatened to be here. “I wouldn’t even touch your door with a 10-foot pole.”

“Scout!” Sophia scolds and was sure that she stepped on her foot for her to be nice because there was a curse and a bang against the doorway’s frame. “But yes she told us to keep you company.” It was always her that was nice to him. It was Sophia who raised his expectations for the people in his life. Caroline was nice but she was still in charge of him, a caring teacher. But Sophia was the inly person he could ever say that she was a friend. Kind and caring and always beaming with positivity as if she has never seen a bad day in her life. It wasn’t fair that she acted so well being such a ball of soft bunny rabbits and pink flowers. 

He still didn’t turn around for them and heard them go in the room. He could tell that it was the Clone that sat down on the floor while Sophia sat on the bed, quickly swinging her feet at the sound of th grandfather clock in the hallways. Why does it seem like every rich person has a grandfather clock around? 

A cool breeze enters the room. “Where is he?” Vincent asks as he looks down at the garden, he never saw his mother as a lover of flowers or any plants. He imaged that everything she touches dies slowly and painfully, turning into the gray shell of its former beauty. Maybe that’s why the Clone was so mean to him. 

“Who?” they both ask in unisom, which would have made anyone shudder by being creeped out by these two identical girls. It didn’t make Vincent even flinch, continuing to stare at the moon. 

“Your other cousin,” he said it in such a way that makes him sound almost jealous, with a sort of venom in his mouth when he said it. “Tall with the curly hair,” being vague to bother them and give off the illusion that he does not care for them. Despite the many months he put into obsessing into meeting them. 

“Oh!” Sophia says, her voice high with positivity, that made him flinch by how loud she said that. “He’s downstairs helping your mother with dinner. He offered himself.” 

He could hear the sarcasm building up in the Clone’s mouth before she opened it. “Yeah. I think he rather chop up onions than be with you.” 

Now he turns around, slowly. It was almost creepy actually. Like in  _ Silence of the Lambs _ , seeing the cannibal slowly turn around to face you would make anyone tense up. He smiles a little when he sees the Clone’s eye look at Sophia and then at the door just in case. She was touch, he could tell but she was also protective and worrisome if someone she cared for got hurt. Thinking of them first before herself. “How does this family even tolerate you I will never know.”

The Clone blinks, and he had a strong feeling she was mocking him. A wall. She was a wall and maybe if Vincent aimed in the weakest brick everything will crumble. Maybe this was a test. Like level in video games before he was worthy in getting the golden trophy at the end. He has to beat out every single score perfectly-- he has to show his mother that he came for a reason and he’s willing to do anything for her just so she can see his worth. That he is her son. He’ll beat the game with a perfect score. “You’re a bitch you know that, right? I have the strongest fucking feeling that you do,” she stands up from the floor slowly and makes her way towards him. “You’re cocky and weird and bet on my own life that you didn’t have a single friend that was your age. You sat alone in lunch just to seem ‘cool’ and some dumb shit like tha. But you’re not special or anything like that. You’re lame and weird and a try hard--” 

_ “I’m sorry.”  _

Scout was frozen when she heard that, as if they had put pause on her as if she’s a movie. Just staring blankly at him, mouth still half open, interrupted by what he had said. She broke from whatever she was under to look back at Sophia, to see if she wasn’t imagining the thing he had said. And by the looks of her face it seems that she wasn’t imagining a thing. With eyebrows shot up and mouth parted as well. Scout finally does close her mouth, feeling an insult bubbling in Vincent’s tongue about how she’ll draw in flies. The comment never came.  _ Holy. Mother. Fucking. Shit.  _

“I’m sorry,” he echoes it as he stares at both of them with apologetic eyes to show remorse. “I’m sorry that I attacked you guys and id you ever felt threatened by me. I… i was under a lot of stress and maybe I could make it up to you? I know you don’t know anything about me but I do want to get to know you.” Vincent stands up from the windowsill and he watches Scout take a half step back. “We are family after all.” He shows her his hand for a handshake. It was said that the origin of the handshake came from showing people that you come in peace, to show that you do not come with a weapon in your hand. He doesn’t have a weapon; but he doesn’t come in peace either. 

Scout doesn’t take his hand, instead she says: “I think dinner is ready.” then she walks away, the door was still open to show that she never trusted him. And perhaps she will never trust him. All he needs is two-thirds of the team to trust him. 

Vincent watches her walk away and with Sophia only in the room, suddenly she’s in front of him. Her hand slowly reaches to touch his hand, her smooth palm brushes against his own and it’s now done. She has always trusted him. She trusts anyone that she care for. Vincent smiles at her, his eyes crumbling up in the corner before she pulls away her hand. But has been done. 

One-third down. 

Two more to go. 

Somehow, Vincent that the moon would enjoy the show. She’ll enjoy this as much as he will enjoy. He’ll prove himself to his mother. And the moon will be his witness. 

  
  



	18. Day 18– 3:00 A.M

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thinks he saw the face of God.

Shane woke up with the feeling of something on his chest, the lack of air coming short and quick before his body expels it so make sure he gets in more air in quicker than he’s letting out, not feeling the oxygen barely even touch the pores of his lungs and have that such oxygen enter his bloodstream. Jesus Christ, being in the hospital made him medical enough to make his parents proud of becoming a doctor. 

He gasps in deep, forces himself to feel his lungs fill with as much air his lungs could swallow. His eyes widen in the dark, the lights and both the curtains and blinds were shut so no light from the posible moonlight could seem into the room; the room so dark that he would not see far for his own nose. Shane swallows as he feels the thing on his chest shift and move, like a heavy and large worm wiggling at the euphoria of the air going inside Shane’s limited lungs. 

The Thing seemed to have swallowed the oxygens around, a bubble to think that it was invisible but also seemed to be whimsical like-- no, it wasn’t whimsical at all. It was occult. Dark and heavy in the air like oil in water, forcing to mingle and touching yet also not at the same. 

Shane swallows air and he forces his eyes open, wide to be mistaken white dinner plates with the dark dots slowly fading like stain being washed harshly with boiling water. His eyes looked around, his heart beating faster and faster and he could hear the muted heart monitor that was outside his bubble; he had no idea how the nurses seemed not to be rushed in with their duties. This didn’t seem real, a glitch in the real life system. 

His eyes wander around the room, not able to even move a single muscle, not even a twitch. His eyes pop to see that even in the dark there are things darker, ink black in the ebony air around him. Shane moves his sight to the only white circle in the room and he sees the black in the middle. An eye. 

In the darkness the eyes grew and closed, ready to see as much as they could when they simply want to. Simply waiting to see the right thing, to enjoy the show. Shane could feel the air just vanish, slowly fading away and his could feel the lack of air makes the corner of his sight turn black-- he was dangling between the death and the life in this bubble. 

Then he realized that he could only see the white eye; easily mistaken as the moon if he did not know that he was swallowed by the jaws of darkness, he realizes that this white eye was not an eye waiting to watch his death like a God watching his death and licking the energy off of him but a clock. The only white in this damned black room. 

Never once has Shane wanted to wish to see the face of God, or any God is there is more than one according to the older religions. But now he is sure he has seen the Judge, the Elder, the Man Upstairs. But it is not a man but an eye or maybe eyes. This was… this was the proof he needed. Shane could have blamed himself, blamed on the lack of air that was happening because of something wiggling on his chest. Was it even on him? But he now has to believe He has to now because this was the universe, this was the demons and ghosts and ghouls he has made fun of many times before as a joke, not believing that such things would come back to haunt him in a figurative and literal sense. 

Now, they were here. In this room. In this bubble. So close and so tight that he could feel jaws and long nails ready to rip his skin off and lick up the blood off of the peeled off skin. He could feel them close and ready to get their revenge-- they were here all together and their energy alone was enough to melt his skin off. 

A scream was caught in his throat and it would never escape. This was the death of how Freddy Kugger does so. This was dying in his dreams. If this was a dream. 

Before the darkness swallow him and his sight, he sees the white eye: the clock. He was able to see the black in the clock, the hands on the clock show the time of his soon-to-be death.  _ 3 A.M.  _

And he feels the monsters he has mocked for years and spit on the idea of them and their legend, he watched the time of his death. And he watched the hand come closer and closer to 3:01 A.M. 

The bubble--  _ pops!  _

The air that came into his lungs made him choke as if it was water instead, and he sits up and he realized that he never had something on his chest. It was simply a blanket. Simply just a piece of cloth. Shane looks around and he sits up, shaking and twitching as this is the first time he has felt his own body and all of the things he had wanted to do while that nightmare happened, the muscle memory of wanting to thrash around and shake. 

Shane’s eyes look at the spaces where the monsters and the cruel faces filled his vision and sees that the spot where those creatures were were simply the figures of his family, asleep around him.

Tears fill his eyes as he hunches over, his body aching for not being used and the whiplash of shaking and moving, his hand going to his neck. 

He swallows and he manged to move his head to the side to see the clock on his wall and he sees that the clock hand has moved to 3:02 A.M. 

  
  



	19. Day 19– Tarot Cards

Francesca was not a religious person. She attended church like any young child but she didn’t believe. How could she believe in the God that cast her out into this small body? But that’s what she thought back then, she didn’t believe into putting so much energy into that God when she knows no matter what, it won’t matter because she is never getting back into heaven. 

Never. 

To replace the sense of religious purpose, the things that this human body makes her wish and desire, she turns to spirituality. The Moon was already in her favor, the Sun wished her the best and the stars… well it seems that they whisper what these human’s God is planning. 

The home she has built stood on the top of a house, after the home that now the Goldsworths run wild in she built this mansion of her own. Large and cold and empty. With white marble halls and cool stone and dull glitter around to make the enemies she has yet to squish under her heel make sure will die a cold death, to intimate them and shock them like a peacock flaunting its feathers. This house was a warning and a boast. A brag. To show that this house might be massive, and that the basement is as big and twice as deep. 

It’s a fucking promise. 

Francesca sits in her home, sitting at her large vanity, white and smooth marble stone cluttered with expensive products to keep her youth on her face. The struggles of having a human body. Her fingers find the cold cream before gently pressing it on her face, spreading it out evenly before her routine continues. It wasn’t time consuming as others, her beauty was helping her very well, but the time she spent is not going to waste. She does have to hurry; she has a date tonight. 

Slipping on a dress, all black with no glitter or glamour on her. Tonight is not the night for such flirtations. The black dress was modest, stopping at her knees and the slip was just below the middle of her thigh. The Devil stands from her vanity to find her pair of heels and stands in front of the full-body mirror before looking deeply at her reflection. If someone stares too long they can imagine her horns or the snake-pupils she once had. She reaches for a necklace and slips on her coat, going down the stairs to the front door. 

“Mayor,” she calls for her butler as she looks in her purse. “If someone looks for me tell them I’m at a meeting.” 

The butler nods, his eyes were gray with the years of being in her service, the Devil had sucked all of the life out of him and only leaving an empty and brainless shell of the man he was before he had entered this empty house. Now he’s as dead as this house. The Mayor, a nickname that was the only glimmer of who he was once before, was already a loyal man. But now his loyalty has been clipped, his wings were pulled away like the wings of a fly being pulled off by a child for self amusement. When he found out what she was, he knew that he could never get away from her. He knew that the only way he could survive is to sign his life away. He read the contract for the small print, but there wasn’t any; she was honest and laid her cards and soul on the table as he signs his soul away with just one condition. Just one-- his daughter is to be unharmed and every single person who shares as drop of his blood will be saved from Damnation.  _ They shook on it.  _

Now he’s just a loyal zombie at her service. “Yes, Ma’am.” he lazily says but his body showed the rigidity of a soldier, straight shoulders and head straight. He held the door open for her and as she walks past him, with those empty gray eyes he could see just a second of his freedom. But the Devil touches his hand, her nails dragging softly against the skin of his wrist. She had left her mark. 

He closes the door and it’s been so many years where he would be in the same house. Another day in his cell. 

***

This fortune teller was famous. Her home was like Francesca’s, on the top of a hill surrounded by a thick forest with many types of trees that no one truly knows how they even got here. Many different species mixed in an area where their species should not exist amongst each other. This fortune teller is said to be in reality a witch but the Devil does not believe that for one second. He has encountered some real witches during the Salem Trials, asking her (well her past self) to take away this curse that she had supposedly landed on them on their bloodline, for these women did not want their descendants to suffer the same pain as they are right now. The Devil had smiled at these women and the tears in their eyes as they were begging on their knees. All she did was whisper: “It is not a curse from me but a blessing from someone else.” She often wonders if those women made out alive without their necks being snapped by the ropes. 

The woman was not a witch but something else, something similar to those who hold magic. It is said that this woman, who was not so old but also not so young as the body the Devil was inhabiting, was the daughter of the fortune teller that a president said had gone to when making important political decisions. This fortune teller did not work often and her late mother had helped the past President so it is a possibility in why she lives in such a large house in such a large slot of land and not worked as often as other fortune tellers. She has power in her veins. Power that has been passed down from generations and generations of welding such power into more power. 

When people-- when humans think that a gift is either a curse from the devil or a blessing from God they are often wrong. Neither negative or positive force have caused humans to have such abilities. Those abilities are simply human-made. 

Francesca knocks on the door with the heavy metal ring, hearing the wood  _ Bang! Bang! _ and the there was an echo all around her and she could feel the vibration on the metal as the sound also bounces around inside the home. 

Not a second later, the door creaked open and a young woman, with sandy skin and almond shaped eyes is revealed. She was tall and slim, with a long neck that dipped into the collar of the long gray dress she wore. Francesca noticed that the young woman’s hands were covered by the long bell sleeve, only showing the tip of her long nails. 

The Devil watched her and she could sense anxiety and ease at the same time. She seemed numb and hollow, the same way the devil had made a common family man into her loyal servant until death pulls them apart and perhaps even after that. It has been so long since she has hand someone by her side and until God comes down from Heaven and puts her into Hell and chains her down to rule, then she will have to drag the Mayor’s soul down with her. 

Maybe this woman was the equivalent to the Mayor. 

“I’m here to see Madam Serilda,” she informs the woman, unsure if she knew who she was. And perhaps she does because when she said that she open the large wooden door wider for Francesca to step into the home. 

The tone of the young woman’s voice was something she could feel before she heard it, sensing the vibrations that would come as her vocal cords begin to shake to say: “Follow me, Ma’am.” the young woman closes the door with a loud, heavy  _ Bum!  _

Francesca has been in this home before but the young woman seemed to know it better than her, her steps were not quick but neither patient. And constant speed on how to move accordingly in this home. The wine red carpet under her heels made it feel as if she did not move quick enough it would swallow her down. This house might be as big Francesca’s but the aura was the same yet so different. 

There was a sense of coziness in the large home, despite the size of it every single inch of it was either covered or occupied by something. A bookshelf, a table, a lamp, a small chair with mountains of blankets and pillows. It didn’t give the same energy as a hoarders home but it did give off the impression of someone not wanting an empty house. The Devil’s was quite the opposite, she did not need to add unnecessary things to her home, no need for a table in the hall or a flower vase or any of the sorts. The only thing perhaps was painting but those were just small things. Not like the bookshelf with books being squeezed in together. 

Finally the young woman stopped in front of a door, not so large as the front door but a door that the Devil had to crank up her neck just a bit to see the horseshoe nailed on the door frame. This is where humans would have thought they could protect themselves from evil, that charms and spells and other things like that could repel it away from their loved ones when in reality, doing such things like that is in fact inviting the evil things in. 

The woman knocks on the door twice before it creaks open for Francesca, the light that was inside cast a shadow at her feet. “She’s been waiting for you, Miss Norris.” the woman says before leaving, the tail of her gray dress brushing against the carpet as she walks away and giving her back towards the Devil. 

She opens the door a bit wider and sees who was waiting inside. An older woman, around her late sixties with her hair covered by a handkerchief but able to see the white hairs try to escape. The woman was the opposite of the younger one, with her pale face and wrinkled skin and scrunched up eyes where there were too many years of smiling and laughing. That’s why Francesca doesn’t laugh. The old woman was sitting behind a large table that was covered in a sheet and clothe of bright red and orange colors as a single deck of cards lays in the middle of such a colorful table. The only dark color in the room besides her. 

“She’s new,” the Devil comments as she enters the room, trusting this woman is not a habit but the woman should trust the Devil coming in and closing her door more. 

Madam Serilda smiles, showing small pearly teeth of age. “I’m getting too old, Miss Norris, far too old. I may be a witch but it doesn’t mean I’m immortal.” 

Norris lets out on of those soft laughs, the type of exhale in amusement. She would hate to admit it to any supernatural being but she likes this human. She was a delight to be around, old but so full of life. Madam Sarilda lived as if she hasn’t aged a year and she was still young on the inside. A human who lives like an immortal. Fascinating and a delight. If she only knew what it meant to be immortal. 

“Sit down, child,” the fortune teller said and watched the Devil sit down in the chair across from her. This was a room. Sacred and even holy. Not in the Christian God sense but in the sense that this was a realm. A sanctuary. “So what do you want to learn? I assume the usual?” 

The Devil smiles and nods, showing perfect teeth and a perfect face that wins her a million dollars by smiling and tapping on her phone just once will win her more. The usual was just power and money-- the thing that she strides for in this lifetime. She has had her fun with love but now it’s time to play seriously. Her ambitions were green and despite she bleeds red but her guts and gore inside was a velvet with a smell of Chanel. “The usual. I just want to see where my business will lead me to.” 

This old witch doesn’t suspect a thing. With this skin acting like a shield against whatever devilish thing might walk in to protect her. This human’s thick skin was something so beautiful and she was ever so lucky for such a thing. And like a doctor, she can’t disclose anything about what she says to her to anyone else. Like in the Catholic belief that when you confess to a crime to a priest, he can’t say anything. 

Madam Serilda reaches, her thin hand was marked with age and spots of many years on this earth to the deck of cards in the middle of the table. It had never occurred to Francesca the old witch’s age. Maybe she shouldn’t. Norris can’t have the risk of caring and getting to know this woman. The Devil watched the fortune teller shuffle the cards, the design on the back of them showed old magic but also no age. The black base and the golden ink shimmer under the light of the candles in the room and the only lamp above them. 

She spreads the cards in a single file in front of Francesca, showing her the back of her future. Showing her what lies ahead: either an open path to wealth and fortune or a wall that goes up to the Heavens that every single person who has met her know that she will climb her way over the wall anyway but perhaps her climbing that wall will be her end. 

Francesca reaches a card from the file, one in the beginning that would be the top of the deck; a habit of order and Francesca has a feeling that when she picks a card in an order it will show process to her success. Secondly, choosing a card from the middle. Not the exact middle but the middle nonetheless. And finally a card from the almost-end. Francesca never chooses the end card. It’s too close to the end of it all. 

Yes, she might be superstitious but when you’re the Devil then you have to be to survive. She will blend into what she sees and to the people who are more than her. 

The fortune teller stacks up her cards again and places them back in the middle of the table, seeming that this is where they always belong: under the light of the shimmering yellow light. Madam Serilda flips the first card and it was the infamous card of  _ Death.  _ Upright. 

“End of a cycle,” Madam Serilda says. “You will start something new in your business. It is the beginning of change.”

Norris understands. She expected that, she is a business owner so she has to do something to keep ahead with the market. 

The second card was  _ Justice _ ; Upright. “Clarity and truth. The truth will be revealed and perhaps it will also affect the people around you.” Norris stares at the card for a while. Who would she effect? She already has her son in Goldsworth’s house, to get him out of the way so she can continue. 

The final card: “ _ Wheel of Fortune. _ Reversed.” The fortune teller reads the card outloud, as if trying to get a grasp of it herself before trying to explain it to Norris. The Devil knows what most of the cards mean, she was aware that they might also predict a downfall but she has never actually paid attention to those cards. She never has had a downfall before. There were missteps and hiccups along the ways but not a fucking tragedy. She didn’t have anything to worry.

Until now. 

“Madam?” Norris whispers and she could feel everything slowly change around her. Twisting and melting into a new path. A future. It was growing like a future that doesn’t have a way to change. That decision had set the future. By her own hand she has made a future for herself that cannot be changed. 

The future is done. 

The fortune teller swallow. “ _ Wheel of Fortune; _ reversed. The meaning of this card is still a type of change, a mishap will come, misfortune will land on your doorstep and it will end something with great misery.”

The Devil-- Francesca Norris stares at the fortune teller who has told her what will happen tomorrow and tomorrow and further on, that her path is clear and joyful and she will be stopped but the foreseen future as a storm will come. 

And it seems that cards are in favor. But who’s? 


End file.
